Wrinkles Attract Publishers

Ed and I live in a small, Victorian house: two bedrooms, one bath, no garage, less than a thousand square feet It’s almost like living in a doll house—except that every bit of wall-space that is at least two feet wide has a bookcase in it…so it’s more like living in a library. There are several thousand books in here, so it’s a real challenge, sometimes, getting from one room to the next without seeing something that begs to be picked up and enjoyed. It’s almost like a house full of children!

Anyway, I’ve been going through all these books, trying to find some to swap with other readers online (if you’re interested in that, drop me a line) and realized that I needed to see what books we were missing from our favorite series. Serieses. Hmmm, that’s funny. How does one make the word “series” plural? This series. And another series. There, that did it.

Like I was saying, I needed to know what books we were missing, impossible as it seems that there could be any book in the world missing from our shelves. So I spent a very enjoyable couple of hours looking at the book lists of our favorite authors, and I noticed something interesting.

None of my favorite authors are young. And none of Ed’s are, either. Once I noticed that, I started paying attention to how old they were when they first started writing—no, when they first started getting attention for their writing (some of them were scribbling stories when they were in second grade!) You know what I discovered? Almost all of them got their first stories published after they were forty.

I’ve been thinking that I was coming late to the party with this writing business, but apparently I’m right on target. And as I gave that a little thought, it made sense to me. To write convincingly about life, one needs to have lived it a bit. We all write best about things we know, after all.

Coming up with a story, creating a world, developing its details, technology, society, religion, mythology, politics, sewer system….that’s all just fun. It’s a glorified form of playing house. They call it con-worlding in my writing group. (This is the gamer term for constructing a world for a role-playing game or a story.) But the best-constructed world in the universe won’t make a story real to the reader. That requires characters who act naturally, have normal fears, hopes, ambitions, who understand (and misunderstand) the actions and motivations of other characters….in short, act like real people.

It takes a while, sometimes a very long while, for humans to mature to the point that we quit obsessing about ourselves and start noticing the people around us. Usually, this happens when children knock us out of the center of our own world. The lessons we learn once we start looking outward are the ones that breathe life and color into our stories. They’re the ones that turn our Pinocchio puppets into real boys.

So, I’m suddenly thrilled to say that I am no longer a youngster with little experience and less water under the bridge (are you enjoying all my mixed metaphors?) I’m going to spend my wealth of experience lavishly on my characters, endowing them with all of the depth and richness that years of living has supplied, knowing that the wrinkles on my face also add expression to theirs. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll catch the eye of some publisher since it’s obvious that Publishers find wrinkles attractive!