Growth Session: Older Writers Emerge Too
Plus: resources /creative prompts/ pruning your writing
This post refers to the recent ‘spring growth session’ that occurred last Saturday on zoom - a live session with discussion, creative prompts and journalling prompts to help you grow your writing. You’ll find a paywall at the bottom of this post, behind which are the prompts and writing extracts from last weekend’s live Spring Growth Session. If you’re a paid subscriber to Notes from the Margin you’ll be able to access these, along with a smorgasbord of archived courses and paywalled essays, plus you’ll have access to April’s Write-A-Thon; a daily writing prompt delivered direct to your inbox. 30 days, 30 prompts.
This season’s live session was all about growth. Growing your writing, pruning your writing to help it grow, identifying places where growth was being impeded. The session was lively: it’s good to give space, and be in a space, in which writers feel safe enough to express their fears, and one of the topics that came up, a topic that almost always comes up, is the fear of being left behind.
As we worked through exercises aimed at identifying what we wanted to write about rather than what we felt we should be writing about. One of the recurring blocks I see writers struggling with is feelings around the pressure to conform, keep up, replicate ‘successful’ writing and writers, all of which end up being a block to authenticity. The talk turned towards feelings of being irrelevant. The feeling of not really being listened to, not really being counted, not being classed as an emerging writer, because all the awards, all the attention, all the references to emergence in the writing community is aimed towards younger writers.
So much of what is happening, particularly in poetry, seems very non traditional in terms of style. But this is how literature evolves. Poetry is not a static art form, it is an evolving art form. Boundaries are always being pushed. I say this a lot, but it’s worth staying again - good writing never goes out of fashion, and authenticity is the path to good writing. Replicating a writing style because you have seen that style win competitions will lead to dissatisfaction because eventually that writing, that writer, won’t progress, they won’t grow.
older writers need more encouragement and recognition. They have a unique viewpoint that is based around longevity, that wide angle shot of the world.
I went to an open mic this week which was at a University.
There were some massively talented students, but most of the poems were about themselves. Inevitable when you are young. You are still finding yourself particularly at 18/19. The skill I think older writers have is to draw more from the wider world, even when writing about themselves. To create metaphors and parallels and perspectives. The skill those young people had which I lack was the performance - they were incredible!
Nina Parmenter
It’s so easy to be dissuaded from writing if you don’t see yourself represented, and aren’t being offered support to grow because you are stereotyped into a box. But things are slowly turning. There have been a flurry of new awards and opportunities for older emerging writers. Here are some that members in the growth session suggested:
Notes from the Margin Member Suggestions
Renita Boyle’s writing group for the over sixties:
Next Chapter Creative Writing Group
The Alchemy Spoon journal supporting emerging older writers
The Bridport Prize - Never Too Late Award - for writers over the age of sixty
The Christopher Bland Prize - An annual award of £10,000 for a debut novelist or non-fiction writer first published in any form aged 50 or over.
Jenny Brown Debut Writers Over Fifty award
I hope you find something of use there. Your voice is valid, your story matters.
And now for the prompts….