Age affecting writing? Not how old you are - but WHERE you are. When I was younger I was pretty morose - so much of my writing reflected that frame of mind. As I grew older (and older, and older) - I had my morose periods, my happy, my cruel, my humane, my parental (as son and father), my wacky periods. I don't think you need to live through a setting to write well about it. But for me stories are emotions put into words - and do have to have lived through that emotion of which you are trying to evoke.
Indeed, my current protagonist is a teenager, though I also write from the view of his mid-twenty year old teacher. I have quite a bit of trouble writing female characters, or romance, as I have little experience in that area. I tend to have much more serious stories, and I would attribute a lot of that to my age and experiences. And, of course, the older one gets the more emotions and experiences they go through, but sometimes they take some of these in a very cynical way, without some of the wonder and creativity that a younger writer would. Though sometimes younger writers can't capture the feelings of adults, or responsibility, and the like, and write based on no strings attached passion, and this has pros and cons, as does everything else. So, in summary, it really depends on what you're writing, which would, I suppose, be the origin of the stick to what you know phrase.
Although I think a lot of good writing comes with experiences and experiences come with time. That isn't to say though that a fifteen year old can't be a better writer than a fifty year old. Everyone is different.[/QUOTE] Again, this girl is a 9 year old art prodigy, she's the exception not the norm for most 9 year olds. This isn't about if young people are qualified to write, or make better or worse writers than an older person, it's about whether or not age effects writing, and the answer to that question is yes. Even if you had a 15 year old writing better than most adult writers, with time and, consequently, age, she will still improve and evolve. Age has to cause change in our writing, because it means the passing of time, giving us more time to practice and learn the skills needed to be good writers. Even just straight experiences don't qualify someone as a writer no matter what age. It's the ability to learn from those experiences, analyze those experiences, and through objectivity incorporate those experiences into our writing. With age comes the ability to do this, though many people never learn, never grow, and never change, because they lack the ability to observe not only the people around them, but themselves as well. Being old doesn't automatically make a person a good writer, just as being young doesn't automatically make a person a bad writer...but through age comes wisdom, and through wisdom comes better writing.
Its true that age brings experience, although as pointed out some young people can write better than most adults, but it really depends what you write, the adage of write what you know is true to some extent as some things could be difficult to write if you haven’t experienced it personally, that’s not to say its impossible if you do your research but just difficult, however one thing that you will notice as you write is that your writing does, or at least should improve over time, so if you are getting novels published in your teens imagine how great you would be when you hit your middle ages
"Write what you know" does not mean you literally only write what you have directly experienced. You don;t have to have travelled to the stars to write good science fiction, nor do you need to have left a trail of corpses in three states to write about a serial killer. What it does mean is that you draw upon your pool of life experiences. Losses, triumphs, regrets, exhilarations, all the people you have come to know well, all the news stories you have followed; these are the database you draw upon when you create your story. The further you stray from your own experiences, the more reliant you are on research, i.e. collecting second-hand information. Does age always bring greater experience? Of course not. What it does provide is a broader opportunity for experience. Some teenagers have lived through more than some octogenarians. But the old man and the young rebel each have experiences that do not even remotely overlap.
Nope. A young rebel in a different time will still have a far different experience base, and there won't be much overlap at all.
Okay, I have definitive proof that age affects writing. This is an example of a man writing about a dog that attacked him. He starts the story while he is young, and then finishes it when he is older. Young man: You know I was like, wham, and the dog was like, errrrrrrrr. My iPod fell and broke. So I kicked the mutt all hard and stuff, but it didn’t seem to do nothing. It just bite me bad, right on the As old man: the posterior, I believe. I fought that dog in six-foot deep snow for five days. Let me tell you, it was like WWII all over again. That dog nearly bested me, but I was young, and I wasn’t about to give up to the Japanese, and I sure wouldn’t let this dog do what they couldn’t.
uh... there were no ipods before wwii, but you seem to have this guy being young enough to have had one and then old enough to have fought the japanese [also while he was young, which seems impossible, too]... a time warp??? ;-)
Are you being serious, or is this some attempt at a joke? Because it sounds like you are insulting the capacity of teenage writers. I know some teens would write like that, but the serious ones are difficult to distinguish from adults in many cases. I believe the general concensus is "Yes, but not so much that there aren't exceptions."
The most common accusation I hear is "you write like you're wearing a tweed jacket while smoking a pipe". I'm 16. Although, of course, writing pretentiously and densely can probably be taken as a sign of immaturity just as writing lik dis wit spellin mistakes rife and grammar haunting incorrect you. am I right? Writing seems to always lean towards over-obscuring emotions (cynically, more 'maturely', perhaps?) or over-emphasising emotions. Of course, the best writing strikes an ideal balance between the two. But, illustrating: "Her well-formed body and beguiling expression made all the more horrible the personality I knew lurked within; repugnant, obsessive, and superficial. The poor man was doomed before he began; the tigress had her claws into him, and was preparing to bite into the very jugular of his emotions." "That beautiful bitch! She'd been looking at him for weeks, the same way she used to look at me. He'd find out, soon enough, that chasing that wildcat was fatal."
And may I say that any 16 year old that reads Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism must have the ability to string sentences together that make people orgasm.
Hmm, seems my post was misunderstood – possibly by more than one person. What I wrote is no joke. Neither does it say teenagers are incapable. It’s just an absurdity, as noted by Maia. All I did was take two stereotypes and juxtaposition them. What someone takes from that is up to them.
I'd say the main differences based on my age came from more experiences, more knowledge and a different mind-set. Aside from the obviousness of practice making things a bit better (maybe more than a bit) I don't see how age really affected my writing, unless to say that it changed the topics I choose to write about.
While age and experience are considerable factors to consider, I think nothing has greater impact on your writing than passion and natural flair. A speaker who burns with passion draws greater crowds than any other, and so it is with writers as well. Mary Shelley was 19 when she wrote her debut novel, Frankenstein, which is still considered one of the great timeless classics in literature, and to be her masterpiece. Did her age play a role in this? Perhaps her young age was partly responsible for the enthusiasm and passion that drove her to write it, who knows. But she had qualities that defied her age as well - her subject was philosophically thought-provoking, her humor grotesque and her characterization revealed profound insight into the human condition - all things that are very rare qualities for someone only 19 years of age. Even in a time when people were forced to mature earlier than today. To a prodigy, age by years has no real significance. If you've got that natural flair for stories and the passion to grab your audience, then it will happen. On the flip side, if you "just don't get it", then 200 years of living isn't gonna change anything.
I don't think the art of writing is proportional to the mundane act of growing up/old. Everyone begins writing at different stages and as most people's styles are so very different and personal it can be difficult to judge their development. Different people like different styles and genres, that's why I think this question is impossible to answer with conviction: it may not be the writer who influences their acclaim but the people who read them. At the other end of the scale, you can never truly retire from writing, and experience, not only of your own emotions, but also of the characters you have met and the world you have travelled will certainly help.
RE: the originating post: There are two questions here ... "Does age effect one's writing?" and ... "How can one transform emotions into words if they do not understand them?" While this has generated some interesting, educational, and exhilerating comments, the answers are pretty simple. Yes, age effects one's writing. This is not to say age will make one a better or more competent writer, only that living, even on a day-to-day basis, cannot help but effect one's writing. (Imagine if you will a sixteen year old who, by the nature of the beast, feels virtually immortal. Then his parents are killed in a car accident. His whole view on life is irrevocably altered, thus, his writing, likewise will be altered. He has acquired a new awareness of mortality.) As to the second part of the question: How does one tranform emotions into words if one does not understand those emotions? We all have a different level or depth of understanding everything in the world, emotions included. This level of understanding changes on a daily basis based on whatever we experience in any given day. We transform emotions into words based on HOW we understand them. Obviously, a fourteen year old experiencing his or her first 'puppy love' does not understand the emotion of love the same as someone who has been thrice divorced or who, having found the person they see as their 'soul mate', ends up sitting by a bedside in a hospital watching that person die a slow, painful death from some terminal illness, or someone who, after living with their life partner for fifty years, loses them, a little at a time, to Alzheimer's Disease. Everything you have ever read is colored by the author's understanding of the world, the sadness, happiness, and passion. Imagine how different the Eragon series would be had the books been written by a 45 year old instead of a 15 year old. And, as already pointed out by others, the world changes, ergo, our perspectives change. Anyone over the age of 50 should be able to easily remember a time when, to make a phone call, you were tethered to a coily cord and, in many cases, had to share a 'party line' with two or three others. If you lived in a small community, you might even have been able to make a phone call using only four numbers! Conversely, anyone born after 1990 would be hard-pressed to recall a time when you could not carry a phone around in your pocket, take pictures with it and send them to all your friends, & snd txt msgs 2 ur frnds in a whole 'new' language (text speak). And the 2-way wrist radio of Dick Tracy cartoons is now a reality with obnoxious beeping in grocery stores and libraries. Computers that 50 years ago were so large they occupied an entire room, required massive air-cooling systems to keep them from overheating, and worked by punching holes in 4 x 8 cards (which could be read only by the computer!), are now so advanced you can speak to a computer sitting on a desk and it will do the work for you! Yes, age will most assuredly effect your writing. Not necessarily for the better or worse, but it will change the way you write because everything you experience changes your perception of the world... as I said before ... whether you realize it or not. And, as others have already noted, sometimes, a very young person experiences literally a world of experience which would overwhelm an older person who has never left his hometown. The question of experiencing emotions, and everything else in the world, is a distinctly unique and individual thing. The 15 year old whose family has traveled the world, obviously has a broader range of experience than the stay-at-home blue-collar mid-western guy. But, the teenager will relate to his experiences differently throughout his life, based on everything that happens after the age of 15, just as the guy from Louisiana, Missouri (Pop. +/- 4,000) will relate to emotions and experiences based on his life story. Since everyone has a different level of understanding at any given age, we cannot codify all 15 year olds or all 45 year olds into one category. So the 15 year old poetic genius will be influenced and changed by everything she experiences throughout her life which will be different from what people perceive as the 'typical' 15 y/o. and the 45 year old machine worker will, necessarily view the world through a different lens - though probably not the same one he used when he was 15.
Therefore it is impossible to be able to say that a certain writer wrote about an emotion the wrong way, as nobody but they know what goes on in their head. That thought always makes me feel safer somehow. Perhaps I have a guilty conscience.
The people who are saying that brilliant writers are not usually under the age of fifty, or whatever their own age is, judging from the tone, lose any credibility with me if they don't address the reverse; that most people over fifty are not brilliant writers, either. As for the 'can't capture the feelings of adults,' that would only be true if they were not capable of experiencing the same, and it's obvious that everyone, regardless of age, can feel the same way. It just depends on the person, not their age.
While I agree with your initial comment, I'm not sure I can support the second half of your statement. A fantastic writer, age 15, cannot possibly expect to feel emotions the same way as a person three times their age. That does not necessarily mean they feel or experience those emotions any less, just differently based on their own personal body of experiences.
wordsmith's right... it's not possible for a 15 year old to 'capture the feelings' of a 70 year old, just as it's not possible for me, at 71, to capture the feelings of a 15 year old living in today's world... while i could certainly get it right for teens back when i was one, i'd have no clue how current ones feel, just as a teen in any time period would have no way to know how one my age feels, not having 'been there' yet... it goes without saying that something approaching understanding and realism could be attained with much research and by interviewing the 'other' age, but that's still not quite the same, or as good, as knowing from personal experience and having had close relationships with contemporaries of that age... it's not necessarily due to lack of talent, just to lack of knowledge...
^ dispite the fact that James Joyce captured the voice of a child perfectly (I found) in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?
