It happens. If we live long enough, we grow old. If we grow old enough, we overstay our welcome. Or, we outlive our usefulness. Or we simply have to make room for the new, and the young. Often, the better. Then, we retire. 

Retire to what? Travelling the world? Redecorating the country estate? Few have the means. So, write a book it is, more often than not. 

It seems to me that there is some subtly spoken, or unspoken, rather romantic illusion about those who take up the pen late in life. They are viewed—or view themselves—as “elder statespersons of the soul,” at last, in the serenity or solitude of their twilight years to dispense hard-earned wisdom. 

It is a charming, delightful lie. 

Many do not turn to writing because they heard a mystical calling. They do it because the real world—the corporate machinery that devoured their prime—eventually moves on from them. And if it so happens that they cannot travel or decorate, they sit down to a blank page, labouring under a desperate illusion: that this life-raft will deliver the means to do what they want. What they have wanted to do all their lives, whatever that may be. They think, “I have managed reality throughout my professional life; surely I can master a novel.” 

Or perhaps they feel time running out, and they want to leave something of themselves behind. Perhaps the need is for a final validation of their lives—successful or mediocre, or even failed, by whomever’s judgement. Or maybe, just maybe, it is to prove that what they have accomplished in one arena, they can repeat in another. 

These are little—or not so little—manifestations of pridefulness from which most of us are soon cured when polite rejections pile up, or the sales figures of self-published efforts barely reach double digits. An objective observer might declare this a lack of “market compatibility”, if not talent. 

Either way, the trap springs. We come to the page late, driven by whatever motivation drives us. And as soon as one book is finished, two, three, the stubbornness of a lifetime takes over. We cannot compromise. We cannot write what is agreeable. We cannot follow the map, or conform to the formula. 

In the end, we are left with nothing but a handful of true readers, an unruly cast of characters, and the quiet satisfaction of knowing that while the pickings remain lean, the soul remains uncompromised. We write only for ourselves. For the sake of writing. 

Will it end that way? 

I don’t know. 

My end is as yet unwritten.