Growing Old in This Culture
This is from facebook.
It's another gray day and I am in another gray mood, in spite of getting a third of the very wet planetary romance revised yesterday. I'm aiming to finish by Thursday, so I can email it out to my writing group. Eek. Thursday is soon. Maybe I will email it Friday.
I have decided, based on a one word comment on facebook, that I am out-of-date, passe, an OF. I suggested to Wiscon a while back that they do another panel on growing old in science fiction, but I can't remember if the panel was supposed to focus on literature or on the human experience of being an aging writer or fan. Worth doing, I think.
What happens when one is no longer cutting edge in a field that is supposed to imagine the future? Though my very wet planetary romance is a pretty darn fine vision of the future, if I do say so myself.
This is not a plea for reassurance. LeGuin said -- or wrote -- that as she aged, she found people ignoring her. If it happens to LeGuin, then no one is safe. It's this phenomenon I'm interested in.
posted by Eleanor at 6:54 AM
1 Comments:
I have been thinking about this thing, but not from an age-related perspective. I think that everyone has a vision that informs their stories, and those visions may be more or less universal. They change as we grow, too, and so we may find that for a brief moment our visions align with the larger community that decides who is "in" and who is not. And then we change, or they change, and though this change happens as we grow older (because of time), it is not necessarily because we are older. What is important, I was reminded this weekend, is to remain true to oneself and write the things that are important. We have a platform now where we can speak to the people who still want to listen, and though there may be a lot of people who consider us either passe or never-arrived, there will always be some people who want to listen. Don't stop talking to them.
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