Sunday, July 04, 2010

Twittering and Ageing

Well, if I hadn't been so busy working on my current writing project I would have blogged about this - a Huffington Post article about the usefulness of Twitter for publishers - and the accompanying perceived need for authors to be on Twitter too, as well as online in all the other ways. (Hah! Nuff said).

I would also have taken up the current debate about age in fiction-writing (too afraid, though, of getting old and conking out before I finish writing the damn thing). I'd have mentioned the great news that an 82-year-old has just published her debut, and Robert McCrum's earlier half-retraction last week about old writers being useless. It's only half a retraction because he says that usually when older writers write something good it's just the one last flowering. This statement is rather undercut, though, by one of the writers he lists, Mary Wesley, since her offering at the age of 70-odd was her first flowering, and she went on to have several more blooms...

8 comments:

Sue Guiney said...

I would take part in this discussion if I didn't find it so incredibly exasperating that all it does is get me angry and depressed. So thanks for doing it for me!

Elizabeth Baines said...

Do you mean the discussion on FB?

Vanessa Gebbie said...

I thought it was really lovely that the publishers mentioned employ professionals to work on the twittering for them, leaving the publishers to do the other publishing and marketing and their writers to get on with writing!
Just read the Attwood post as well. Good for her!!! Im pinning that up above my desk.

tracy said...

It is exasperating, but it feels like more people are noting the limitations of thinking that you write it young or not at all...for example, a publisher in Australia last year established a prize for an unpublished ms written by someone over 35. (Not that I think 35 is aged)

Adrian Slatcher said...

I'm still trying to work out from McCrum's piece in what way Crime and Punishment is in any way "a love story" - and how Whitman fits in to his argument since all his work was written later, not just one late flowering.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Yes. Hm.

mayo ninja said...

btw check out west end girls by barbara tate - she was 83 years old when she struck her first publishing deal, but she died before release!!! which is any day now.

tragic, but never mind; apparently getting published lit her up

Elizabeth Baines said...

Hm...