Never growing up

This blog post is inspired by two things I've read this last week.  The first was the book You Are More Cretive Than You Think by Rod Judkins.  The second was Tony Rossiter's On Writing column for the July edition of Writing Magazine.

Rod Judkins tells the tale of the optical mouse prototype presented to Steve Jobs by Harvey-Kelley.  It was cobbled together from an assortment of unlikely junk, but it was the prototype of the optical mouse that we all use today.  Jobs recognised its potential, a potential that was realised through play.

Tony Rossiter's column extols the virtues of being of a mature age when writing.  As he points out, the older you are, the more reading you've done.  And for writers, the older we are, the more writing we've done.  Getting older has some advantages, he points out.  It can mean that you're freed from obligations - looking after kids or aged parents, and if you're really lucky, work.  We have more free time to write.  We also have more life experience to draw on, more to write about than a twenty-something,

But one of the challenges we do face as older writers is not thinking "old". We may have got to an age when we think we really ought to be "grown up", whatever that means.  We've had our serious careers, got our houses and mortgages, and acquired all the stuff that we think we need in order to be "successful".

I think we need to take a good, hard, look at our"growing up".  If it means we think think play is beneath us now, that's definitely bad for our writing.  We need play to kindle our creativity.  Every storyline every book we write is created out of nothing.  The characters, their names, occupations, motivations, actions, all only exist as creations on paper.

The places they inhabit, the things they do, are all created by us out of the ether.  Our first drafts need a large dollop of play and experimentation.  And if we've decided that we've grown up and are too old to play, then that's a problem for our writing.

For that reason, and for so many others, I think I'll pass on growing up.  I'll keep the freedom of my days and my mind, and I'll continue to play in the universes of the future.  I'm never growing up.