Writing and Aging – Guest Post by Christopher Meeks

A close friend of mine in his eighties sent me his memoir in manuscript form. I found it fascinating as I’ve known the man thirty-five years. I had suggestions for him on perhaps reshaping it for a larger audience. 

He wrote me back saying how writing has changed for him as he’s become older. As he explained, “Throughout my career, unless I was doing stuff for hire, I wrote only what I was passionate about, what I had a real drive to express. That is not how I wrote the memoir. I have had lately very little passion to write. Probably it has something to do with age and time.”

He said he wrote the memoir merely to watch less television. He’d get some facts down, and he didn’t care what it meant. That disappointed me. Still, I’m not in my eighties. 

That interaction made me examine my own writing over the years and, in a bigger sense, how writers develop and change as they age.

My first biggest step was in my twenties, after college. I wanted to write for a living. I applied to grad schools and went to USC’s Professional Writing Program, which has since disappeared. I chose it because I would have to write three theses: a novel, a screenplay, and a stage play. It was a lot of work, but I figured it would offer me many possibilities.

I made friends in the program. We pushed hard to write well and stand out. We were the bold young Turks, and the program promised various doors into movies, television, novels, nonfiction book writing, and plays. None of my friends were employed or married then, and most who I had met there had arrived from far outside Los Angeles. This was their chance to follow their passion. Almost everyone I knew from that time ended up writing for a living.

A month before I earned my degree, I landed a job as an editor and writer at a publishing house, Prelude Press. My first hurdle in writing personal projects was finding time to write after spending my day editing and writing for someone else. 

After I married and my son, Zach, was born, more pressure formed not to write. There was much to do as a father. To keep my career on track, I joined a screenwriters group to remind myself of my original goal, to get into Hollywood. I learned to get up at 5 a.m. before anyone awoke and before I had to get to my job. I found ways to get my screenplays out by writing really good letters. 

Getting to major stars was easier than getting to agents. In fact, agents may be the most difficult people to hear from on earth. Still, when movie stars and agents contacted me, I knew I’d written good letters. One thing I learned is you can’t be obsessive enough in writing the perfect letter. Write, rewrite, have people proofread. 

I also learned a tough lesson about screenwriting: you can be encouraged to death. I’d hear variations on this: “I really loved your script. You’re a good writer. Unfortunately, you wrote a period piece, and a period piece is so difficult to set up. If you write a contemporary story, please contact me. I admire your work.” 

I then might spend a year on a contemporary piece and then hear, “I really loved your script. You’re a good writer. Unfortunately, some of the action takes place on a lake, and we already have a project in the works that takes place on a lake.” 

You get the idea. When I had a few scripts optioned, two things happened in the option period. One was that I had to rewrite, sometimes in ways I thought was stupid—but anything for a movie. The second was the script was shopped, no one bought, and the script was dead. I felt I wrote for about twelve people per script. Hollywood wasn’t for me. 

In another few years, I became Institute Writer at CalArts. It still meant I was writing for someone else, but I was surrounded by a sea of students and faculty, all focused on their creative pursuits. It reminded me to stick with mine. 

Once I started teaching there, I found a balanced career: I could inspire others to write while I continued my personal projects. I had three plays produced. Plays don’t make a lot of money, but theatre people are supernovas, amazing to behold. So much life happens in the theatre. If one wanted to make a living at it, though, moving to New York as Jon Robin Baitz had from Los Angeles seemed to be the path. I didn’t want to move to New York. 

I finally focused on the form I yearned to pursue but scared me: fiction. I wouldn’t have a director or actors give me suggestions or feedback, however, as I did with my plays. I would be naked. 

I started small, getting short stories published in literary journals. Then I landed an agent, who was impressed with my short fiction but pushed me to write a novel. Short story collections, he said, don’t sell. “Fifteen percent of nothing is nothing,” he said of his potential commission.

Thus, I’ve written and published five novels so far. Before that though, I created White Whisker Books to publish two collections of short stories. I simply followed the routine I’d learned at Prelude Press, hiring first a professional editor, then a publicist, and sending my books directly to reviewers, particularly at newspapers. In 2005, newspapers were a big source for reviews. (Now it is a different story.) In fact, I’d been a reviewer at two newspapers. 

I could go on with each turn in my career, but my bigger point is I’ve kept focused on what’s interested me at any given time: plays, short stories, or novels, all inspired by something in my life or in the world at large.  

That’s the point of aging, it seems to me: to keep inspired. I’ve known people who find their jobs as boring, and life is boring except when partying. That’s one approach. Most writers I know though, keep writing because they keep finding life fascinating despite it being incredibly difficult at times. Relationships crash. Friends and family die. How we get through the tar pits in our lives consumes everyone at points. Problems either break us or re-inspire us. 

Life is worth writing about. It’s what I do. I hope to keep the momentum going until the end.

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