Is it ever too late to start writing? With some careers, youth is the best time to start – with more athletic careers, including ballet dancing, it’s pretty much a requirement. Some sports and forms of dance can be taken up later. And so can drawing, painting, music, and writing – even if you never mean to pursue them as a career. But what if you do want to be a professional writer? What happens with writers who start later in life?
While the publishing industry often seems more interested in younger and more photogenic writers, the truth is there are plenty of older writers too. Of course, they may have started out at a younger age. The average book buyer is older and if representation really matters in publishing, then it ought to apply to older readers finding characters like themselves in books too.
Of course, this is not to say that older readers always want to read about older characters.
Just starting out? But are you really just starting?
One thing I’ve noticed about many, many older writers who are starting out is that they say they’ve been writing since childhood. Or they started young and somehow life got in the way.
For women, who may have childrearing and carer duties on top of other demands, it can be especially difficult to make the time to continue writing. Indeed, some women writers feel guilty about the time they take away from parenting or domestic duties to spend time writing.
This can lead to gaps in writing experience. A passion that started early can often be sidelined to make way for more serious responsibilities. Plans to get started on writing again can get delayed indefinitely. Or they can be put off until the children grow up or retirement comes.
But that then leaves some writers looking around at the youth of so many writers on social media, thinking maybe it’s too late. Maybe I’ve missed my chance. Maybe no one will be interested in what I have to write. Maybe it’s too late to make my mark.
There is also the issue of not having a long career if you start too late.
Self-publishing versus traditional publishing
The reality is that it’s not too late and I will list some examples of different writers further down. Sometimes a writer has published earlier in life and then left a long gap before they return to writing. Sometimes a writer’s earlier books didn’t take off so well and the real masterpiece comes much later.
Joan Lindsay was 71 when she wrote her masterpiece, Picnic at Hanging Rock. And she wrote it fast, after a series of dreams.
While Lindsay was dealing with the mainstream or traditional publishing industry, self-publishing is the new game in town. Though by this point – 2025 – it’s far from new. Many working in indie publishing have long established careers by now.
In indie publishing it really doesn’t matter how old you are, or what you look like, or what your background is. You don’t have the publishing industry acting as a gatekeeper.
Working with older writers
As a developmental editor I’ve worked with a number of older writers. Sometimes they have retired and are now dedicating their new free time to their writing dream. That writing dream has often been around for a long time.
One writer I worked with, who must have been in her seventies, was going through old diaries from the 1960s and novelising them. She brought the world of 1960s San Francisco to life, complete with the social movements of the time, the music, and the vibrancy of her long-gone youth. Because she had her own journals, her writing was fresh and youthful.
During the Covid period, when many people were locked down, there was a sudden flurry of writers looking for developmental feedback. I was very busy during this period. Many of the writers I worked with then were starting out, or they’d been writing as a hobby for a while and were now looking to take their writing further. This led to me offering quite a bit of coaching feedback during that period, helping those writers develop their skills further.
Examples of writers who started late
Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are huge classics of the fantasy genre, right? But did you know that Tolkien was 45 when he published The Hobbit? His work is so influential that it’s impossible to imagine what fantasy would look like without his books. Tolkien was an academic, and that experience and background was hugely beneficial to his later career as a writer.
Ian Fleming, who created the iconic James Bond, was 44 when he published the first in the Bond series, Casino Royale. Imagine he’d decided it was too late to become a writer? Not only would publishing and readers be deprived of an iconic series, but Hollywood would have suffered too. Bond triggered a number of espionage films in the 1960s. Even Austin Powers owes his existence to Ian Fleming’s Bond.
Bram Stoker was 43 when he published The Snake’s Path, and 50 when he published the iconic Dracula, which changed the vampire genre forever.
Or how about Watership Down, published when Richard Adams was 53?
Then there’s The Wind in the Willows – published when Kenneth Grahame was 49.
Meanwhile Daniel Defoe was 59 when Robinson Crusoe was published.
Here are some more writers and the ages they were when they started:
Author of the Jack Reacher novels – Lee Child (44)
Tropic of Cancer author – Henry Miller (44)
Raymond Chandler (51)
Black Beauty author – Anna Sewell (57)
Writer of The Shipping News, Brokeback Mountain, and more – Annie Proulx (57)
Mary Wesley (57 for her children’s fiction, and 71 when she published her first adult novel)
Author of Little House on the Prairie – Laura Ingalls Wilder (65)
If you’re an older writer and you’re looking for feedback on your novel or memoir, feel free to contact me about your manuscript. I have different feedback options, ranging from alpha reads (giving you feedback on an earlier draft), to manuscript critiques (with different price tiers), and full developmental edits. I also offer outline critiques and opening chapters developmental editing packages.
If you want to check to see if we’re a good fit, I offer a free sample edit. I work in adult fiction – science fiction, fantasy, horror, historical, literary, thriller and romance. I have also worked with memoir. I have no experience with children’s fiction.
Wondering what the difference is between a manuscript critique and a developmental edit? Go to this post for more information: Developmental edit or manuscript critique?
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In an earlier blog post, I brought up the topic of whether it’s worth dusting off an old rejected novel. After all, the reasons for rejection might relate more to submitting against dominant publishing trends rather than writing a bad book. In this post, I explore revisiting a rejected novel. Because often the advice is to leave them. But this is not always the best advice. It really depends on a number of things.
Some first novels are also overly ambitious and beyond the writer’s abilities at the time. But after more experience, it’s possible to revisit a rejected novel, polish it up, and bring it to publication.
Case study: Hilary Mantel
The case study I’m going to use is that of the late Hilary Mantel, the author of Wolf Hall. The first novel she ever wrote was the French Revolution novel, A Place of Greater Safety. She was twenty two when she started writing it and she was interested in writing from the perspective of the leading revolutionaries. Because she was moving abroad to Botswana, she had to do a lot of her research at the start, taking advantage of still being in England.
In an interview with the Paris Review she said that she only became a novelist because she thought she’d missed her chance to become a historian.
How fitting then that she started with historical fiction.
A Place of Greater Safety
She wanted to tell the story of the revolution from the viewpoint of the idealists who drove it, not the aristocracy they targeted. She felt the story she wanted to read wasn’t there, so she wrote it. She started off intending it to have a documentary element to the writing (which in some ways is still present in some places), and when she could she quoted directly from history. But she ran out of known facts at times, leading her to have to make things up, but never in a way that went against historical truth.
It was simply a case of not enough being known about some revolutionaries or some events. She never changed the truth to ramp up the drama:
I aim to make the fiction flexible so that it bends itself around the facts as we have them. Otherwise I don’t see the point. Nobody seems to understand that. Nobody seems to share my approach to historical fiction.
Hilary Mantel in the Paris Review
At the time of the original writing, she did not focus on the women around these men. She lived part-time as an eighteenth century man in 1790s France and part-time as a woman in the real world of Botswana.
When she finished her novel, she grieved for the characters. Like her, they’d been young.
Facing rejection
But now that she’d finished the French Revolution novel, she had to try and get a publisher or agent. Unfortunately, there was no interest. The market had turned against historical novels, and at least one person rejected outright on the basis they didn’t take historical romance. Yet that wasn’t the book’s genre.
Mantel also had health issues and spent time in hospital during this period. She came to realise then that the novel would not be published for now, though she had not lost faith in it.
And so Mantel turned to contemporary fiction. It was her ‘cunning plan’ to get a publisher and a foot in the door. After she had some success there, she was contacted by Clare Boylan who was writing an article on unpublished first novels. Did Mantel have one? The answer of course was yes. But of all the authors Boylan contacted, Mantel was the only one who wanted to see her first novel published. It had sat on a shelf for many years.
Finally submitting the novel
I thought, What if it’s no good? Because if it is no good, then that’s my twenties written off. And it also means that I commenced my career with a gigantic mistake. But inside me there was still a belief that it would be published one day.
Hilary Mantel in the Paris Review
The day Mantel took her manuscript to her agent, she met another writer for lunch first, and they warned her not to submit it. But she ignored this advice and did it anyway.
Many years had passed since she’d written the novel. Mantel was a lot older, and more academic work had been done on the French Revolution, including feminist historians researching the women involved.
With her novel finally accepted, Mantel plunged into a furious summer of reworking. This included building up her female characters more. But the size of the book meant that she was not able to polish everything to her satisfaction. She’d written the novel in present tense and someone at the publishing house objected to this. Yet the novel still has present tense at times.
A Place of Greater Safety
Indeed, the novel’s style is somewhat erratic at times – it even resorts to simple dialogue scenes written like a script in parts. The novel was published without Mantel sorting out all the issues. The summer of rewriting took its toll on her. But the book finally emerged, going on to win the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award.
Written in her twenties, in the 1970s, it was finally published in 1992. She had not started her career with a gigantic mistake. She had not wasted her twenties. She fully captured the youthful idealism of the revolutionaries at a time in her life when she could identify with them. Then once she’d established her name enough, she was able to get the novel accepted.
Her cunning plan worked out.
Later she would realise, when writing about Thomas Cromwell, that she couldn’t have written A Place of Greater Safety in middle age. She was more cynical by then. But she would go on to make her name as a writer of historical fiction with the Thomas Cromwell novels.
Feel free to check out my long review on A Place of Greater Safety, and my post about dusting off an old rejected novel. If you have a long-abandoned manuscript you’re thinking of reworking, you can check out my manuscript critique service. While there are different tiers, depending on the depth of the feedback, the lowest tier or a special package can be arranged for a shorter assessment of your draft. Feel free to contact me at karen@indiecateditorial.com to discuss your options.
It should be recognised though that sometimes authors cannot bear to go back to an earlier rejected book. Sometimes the enthusiasm is no longer there. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t learn from the writing.
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I’m not sure when I first came across a book by Tanith Lee. My first real memory of seeing one is likely from the 1980s – Sabella. I remember standing in the local bookshop, a family-run business founded in the 19th century. Sabella was sitting on a shelf with a cover picture of a young woman wearing a pendant. Curious, I picked it up to look at it. I didn’t buy it then. I filed it away for future reference. Now she’s the most represented author on my bookshelves.
Tanith Lee was the author of over 90 novels and 300 short stories. She wrote in multiple genres – fantasy, science fiction, horror, historical, and even a crime novel. She won several prestigious awards and was nominated for many more.
Her lush, imaginative fiction ranged from children’s stories, to young adult novels (before YA was even a category), right through to adult fiction.
And if that wasn’t enough, she wrote two episodes of the cult British science-fiction series, Blake’s 7.
Tanith Lee never had any children. Her husband John Kaine says, in the opening to Night’s Nieces, a collection of stories by women writers influenced by Lee, that children would have taken away too much writing time. But she would happily have given birth to cats.
Lee met Kaine, an artist and writer, in 1987 and they married in 1992. Sadly, Lee died in 2015 from breast cancer at the age of 67. But, in her long career stretching over more than forty years, she accomplished more than the vast majority of writers ever do.
Lee’s childhood and upbringing
Lee was born in 1947. Her parents were professional dancers, which led to the family moving around a lot for work. Mildly dyslexic, she learned to read at the age of eight with the help of her father and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. By nine she was already writing. But she found school and homework an interruption to ‘the fantasy projection of my inner world.’
In spite of reading late, she managed to pass her eleven-plus exam and entered grammar school. There three teachers inspired her – the history teacher, the English teacher, and the religion teacher. She would later describe them as her intellectual heroines. They were so interested in their subjects, they were able to pass on that interest, something that would influence Lee in her own writing.
Likewise, her father introduced her to Shakespeare and retold the different tales with genuine passion and love for the subject. Picking up on this, she went on to read them herself. Meanwhile her mother told her fairy stories, but, in her mother’s version, the prince would marry the wicked witch, which is just the sort of thing you’d expect in Lee’s later reworking of fairy tales.
After leaving school, she went on to study at Croydon Art College, dropping out after a year. Then she had a string of jobs, including assistant librarian.
Early success
Her first story was privately printed, and her children’s book The Dragon Hoard was sold when she was only 21. But it was The Birthgrave, a fantasy novel rejected by UK publishers, that propelled her to full-time professional writer when it was purchased by the US publisher DAW Books.
In my twenties some of my work for children was published by Macmillan. However, I was twenty-seven before my adult novel, The Birthgrave, was taken by DAW Books in the USA. This enabled me finally to stop doing stupid and soul-killing jobs, and start working day and night as a professional writer.
It felt like a rescue from damnation, and still does.
Tanith Lee in interview with Tabula Rasa
Writing method
Lee wrote by hand. She described it as almost writing in a zigzag, across and down. Her mother typed up her early stories, before she later typed them up herself. She claimed that no one (other than her mother presumably) could read her writing. Sometimes when Lee went back to type up her longhand manuscript, even she couldn’t read some bits herself.
She wrote fast. On average, one hundred pages a month and a full novel in longhand in about four months. But she told a shocked Stan Nicholls that her vampire SF novella, Sabella, was written in nine days. Unfortunately, she was blocked for one and a half days, otherwise Sabella would have been finished sooner!
To put this in context, the finished book is around 150 pages.
She also mentioned in a 1998 interview in Locus Magazine that she used to throw out her old handwritten manuscripts, but now at age 50 she kept them in case anyone was ever interested in seeing them.
When it came to research, Lee would read books and watch films about the relevant locations or eras. She also told Mavis Haut, author of The Hidden Library of Tanith Lee, that she sometimes just rushed in and wrote from her gut and instinct.
Lee would begin a project by telling herself she would start a story/novel tomorrow or whenever. She could start out with as little as a title, an image, a phrase, a feeling. Sometimes the characters came first, or the location, or even the time of day. On other occasions she might plan a bit in advance, but not even to the midpoint. She noted that her characters influenced the direction and ending of a plot. And her characters always surprised her. Which likely made it impossible to nail down a full outline in advance.
If she ran into blocks, and taking breaks didn’t work, she found she just had to hack her way through. Writing, when it went well, was like being possessed.
I suppose if I analyse it, it’s a case of letting go of the here and now, and getting into the then and there.
Tanith Lee in interview with Stan Nicholls
Lee was not someone who spent much time in rewriting. She would go through and tidy sentence structure and remove repetitions. But she didn’t rewrite for editors unless there was a genuine error. This might explain why her prose can be denser than other writers in the same genres.
She believed that when a book was ‘coming’, it came right. And the writing often poured out of her, though she could be hit by pauses when she struggled over something. Her French Revolution novel was an exception at the time of the interview with Stan Nicholls in that she wrote three drafts.
Lee also didn’t write for the market. She followed her own muse and instinctively knew that writing for the market would mean the end of her career and her love of writing. She had to write what she wanted to write.
It’s possible that in addition to having plenty of ideas to work with, the idea of writing commercially was like returning to the normal world of work she’d been glad to escape in her twenties. And, as a writer, she could live and work according to her own schedule. Her time was her own, not something to be fitted in around the demands of a full-time employer.
Lee’s approach to genre
In interviews, Lee often expressed a dislike of labels and genre. Her multi-genre interests would become a problem in the nineties as I deal with below. There are clearly far too many books to include here, so I’ve chosen to pick out only a few as examples.
Fantasy
For Tanith Lee, a good fantasy novel was similar to a good historical novel. And it was with fantasy that she began her professional career. I am less familiar with her early fantasy novels and can’t comment on them much other than to say they made her name. The Flat Earth Series in particular seems to be highly regarded.
Children’s fantasy was a big part of her work in this genre.
Some of her contemporary books, published later in her career, also had fantastic elements, like Eva Fairdeath, a post-apocalyptic novel. She also wrote dark fantasy – the Paradys series would be an example of that, though I deal with that later. Fairy tale and mythological stories overlap with fantasy, and that’s the next topic.
Fairy tales
Lee would go on to rework classic stories, most famously in her collection Red as Blood: Tales From the Sisters Grimmer. Just as her mother could turn fairy tale endings on their head, Lee too would make the supposed Evil Stepmother the heroine, and the Snow White character the real danger.
When The Clock Strikes is a retelling of Cinderella with a mysterious and sinister narrator:
Yes, the ballroom is filled only with dust now. The slender columns of white marble and the slender columns of rose-red marble are woven together by cobwebs. The vivid frescoes, on which the Duke’s treasury spent so much, are dimmed by the dust: the painted goddesses look grey. And the velvet curtains–touch them, they will crumble. Two hundred years now since anyone danced in this place on the sea-green floor in the candle-gleam. Two hundred years since the wonderful clock struck for the very last time…
When the Clock Strikes, Tanith Lee
Beauty and the Beast meanwhile opens on the Beast in space, looking down on Earth.
While Lee followed in the wake of Angela Carter’s feminist reworking of fairy tales, her multi-genre background, lush language, and strong visuals contrast with Carter’s style. Both writers bring their own unique style to their fairy tale retellings.
Science Fiction
When it came to science fiction, Lee wrote in the genre, but didn’t like some of what was published there and described herself as running in the opposite direction. She had read a lot more fantasy and science fiction in her teens, but in later years was drawn to other authors. Ray Bradbury was one of the authors she still bought. Her SF novels are often utopian-dystopian in nature. On the one hand, there are beautiful people living privileged lives, but there is always a dark underside.
Biting the Sun
In Don’t Bite the Sun (1976) and Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977), we’re introduced to what appears to be a utopian society. The opening lines show the narrator’s friend has killed himself again, for the fortieth time, needing a replacement body. This is a world where people kill themselves out of boredom, only to come back. The problems of utopianism and the lack of challenge to the young characters lead them to hedonism and lives that are less fulfilled than they could be. The characters can change bodies and genders, but their robot world leaves them with nothing else to do. To escape this world means exile and the dangers of what lies beyond.
Originally published separately, they now appear in a single volume (see above).
In The Silver Metal Lover (1981), Jane, a spoiled young woman, falls in love with a minstrel robot, Silver. Of course he’s different from the other robots. There is something unique about him, and it comes to represent the question of whether a robot can have a soul. Jane’s mother is a domineering figure, while her young friends are spoilt and shallow. A coming of age story, the MC has to break away and risk going out into the world without her mother’s money, all the time in danger of being found by the corporation who want Silver back.
These science-fiction novels fit into the Young Adult category. They’re lush and descriptive, with young characters trying to find their own way in their dystopian worlds. The Silver Metal Lover is particularly well-loved among fans.
Sabella – not the cover I originally saw
I was out hunting the night my aunt Cassie died. As she was taking her last breath of revitalized Arean air, I was high on the Hammerhead Plateau, under forty thousand stars burning like diamond bonfires. Maybe I even killed in the same minute she let that last breath go.
Opening lines of Sabella
In the novella Sabella, Lee combined a story set on another planet (very similar to Mars) with the vampire genre. Humans have settled on Novo Mars, but the original inhabitants of the planet are a mystery, though archaeological artefacts have been found. Main character, Sabella, is a young woman, living by herself. It soon becomes clear that she is a vampire. But she doesn’t understand her own origins. After killing a lover, she suddenly finds a stranger at her door, a man who stalks her, wanting to know the truth…
Lee’s SF stories are poetic and lush. Within the then male-dominated field she was writing something quite different.
Horror, Gothic and vampire fiction
When it came to horror and dark fantasy, Lee had very much a goth sensibility. You can see it in photos of her as a young woman. Vampires creep up quite a bit in her writing. From her short story, Bite Me Not or Fleur de Fur, to her Blood Opera Sequence, to the 1995 novel Vivia, and many more stories.
Her Paradys series of books included The Book of the Damned (1988), The Book of the Beast (1988),The Book of the Dead (1989), and The Book of the Mad (1993). Set in an alternative Paris, the first book, Damned, is made up of three novellas, each set around different colours and stained glass windows. The time periods are the 19th century, the early fourteenth century, and the 1930s/40s. The first novella again deals with vampires.
The Booklist critic Roland Green said, “The whole work is an astonishingly good mix of horror, historical fantasy, and intense but well-handled eroticism… all of which no fantasist but Lee could probably achieve.“
The Book of the Dead
The third book in this series, The Book of the Dead, is a series of connected stories. Lee would revisit alternative locations with her Secret Books of Venus, set in an alternate Venice.
Then there was her Blood Opera Sequence of gothic/vampire novels – Dark Dance (1992), Personal Darkness (1993), and Darkness, I (1994). Mavis Haut notes in her book, The Hidden Library of Tanith Lee, that this series had a contemporary setting owing to a request from the publisher.
Another vampire novel is The Blood of Roses, a huge book published in 1990 in the UK which didn’t stay in print for long. It was never published in the US. Luckily, Immanion Press have republished this book in two volumes.
Sudden publishing obstacles in the 1990s
But after her successes in the 1970s and 1980s, she hit major obstacles in the 1990s. Due to changes in the publishing industry (including consolidation), she suddenly found her proposals and books rejected. Publishers and editors who’d worked with her previously were no longer interested. There came a point where fans wrote to ask if she’d died because no new books had been published.
Because she wrote in more than one genre, she could receive rejections from publishers saying they’d never heard of her (because they were unfamiliar with her other genres) or she wasn’t writing what she usually did, so they weren’t interested. However, the problems escalated in the nineties.
In spite of this, Lee just kept on writing, building up a body of unpublished work, stacked in a cupboard. The problem in publishing related to a number of changes that took place in that decade. But the increasing obsession with publishing categories and authors writing the same kind of thing (seen as more reliable and less risky) hit multi-genre authors like Lee.
”If anyone ever wonders why there’s nothing coming from me, it’s not my fault. I’m doing the work. No, I haven’t deteriorated or gone insane. Suddenly, I just can’t get anything into print. And apparently I’m not alone in this. There are people of very high standing, authors who are having problems. So I have been told. In my own case, the more disturbing element is the editor-in-chief who said to me, ‘I think this book is terrific. It ought to be in print. I can’t publish it – I’ve been told I mustn’t.’ The indication is that I’m not writing what people want to read, but I never did.”
Tanith Lee in Locus Magazine
Ultimately, smaller publishers and the internet would come to the rescue. Immanion Press have also re-released some of her books and published newer works.
But the changes that came in the nineties impacted a lot of authors. It wasn’t just a multi-genre writer like Tanith Lee. Midlist authors in general took a hit. As time went on, publishing decisions were founded on the sales figures for the last book. If the last book didn’t do so well, you’d likely face rejection.
Judas Garbah and Esther Garber
Later, Lee would write some fiction ‘channelled’ from Esther Garber and her half-brother Judas Garbah. These writing personae allowed her to explore same-sex attraction. The short story collection Disturbed by Her Song brings these stories together. While I believe I have this book on my Kindle, I haven’t had a chance to read it. This collection was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Speculative Fiction since the channelled sibling writers are gay.
Lessons to learn from Tanith Lee
As a developmental editor and fan of her work, I was particularly interested in her approach to writing, which is why I’ve focused more on that than on the individual works themselves. I found her ‘channelling’ of her stories, as if picking up something from the atmosphere to make perfect sense for her style of writing. In one interview, she even speculated on it being related to ‘race memories’:
…we’re all built of all these genes in little bits and pieces that come through to us from the very beginning of our ancestry and it seems to me quite logical that some of those genes can carry recollections. Some people are more susceptible to it than others, which means one’s seen a hell of a lot of things, the genes have, and if they can pass it on to the brain, one could pick it up, and amalgamate a bit here and a bit there, and you’d have a story and a set of characters.
Not all writers approach writing like Tanith Lee. Some writers are conscious plotters. In another blog post, I addressed Ira Levin’s very different style of writing where he only wrote one draft, but went over and over a scene before moving on to the next. With Lee, the writing is pouring out from somewhere.
She deals with myth, fairy tale, archetypes, gender and sexuality, and much more. She saw her overall body of work like a mosaic, with the overall picture not yet clear.
My aim with this post was to introduce new readers and also writers to Lee. But I’m often concerned with some of the writing advice given to writers, especially newer writers. It often demands a very conscious approach to the writing process, juggling different components of writing in a way that might overwhelm some writers.
Sometimes it looks like the component parts of a fictional machine lying dismantled on the floor. Yet writing is organic.
Part of the reason for some of this advice is about marketing expertise and trying to find some writing topic to show that expertise. This can lead to informative posts. But some of the advice looks too much like micro-managing to me. It might work for some writers, but it will possibly lead to writing blocks for others.
Lee’s early exposure to fairy tale, Shakespeare, and more, and her advanced reading skills (once she overcame the mild dyslexia problem) likely gave her an instinctive grasp of storytelling, character, and theme.
Reading lots of books is the best advice for writers. Absorb different styles and see what works best for you. You might indeed be someone who likes to plot out your novel with spreadsheets. But you might be someone who feels they’re possessed, channelling characters and wondering what the hell is going on.
Well, you wouldn’t be the first writer to experience that. For Lee, it seemed to be part of what made her work resonate with so many people.
When you mention Tanith Lee’s name online, you’ll often find strangers turn up to say how much they loved her books. But in Lee’s case, there are so many books, and even more short stories.
Darrell Schweitzer once said that:
…this lady is one of the literary dynamos of our time, enormously prolific in the novel, the short story and all lengths in between; but, quite unlike most hyper-prolific writers of the past, she has maintained an astonishingly high level of quality throughout her career
References
The Hidden Library of Tanith Lee by Mavis Haut (McFarland, 2001) digs into many (though not all) of Lee’s novels. There is also a brief interview with Lee at the end.
Has an Art Deco Radio Box in Her Head – Chapter 37 of Wordsmiths of Wonder by Stan Nicholls (Orbit, 1993). This book is a collection of interviews with different authors. The tag line on the cover says ‘Fifty interviews with authors of the fantastic’. Lee’s interview digs into her childhood, her early career, her issues with categorisation, how long she takes to write, and more. It was a good source of information for this article.
Some of Lee’s books, especially short story collections, have either forewords or little snippets of her commentary introducing them, which has added to my understanding of her approach to writing.
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Brokeback Mountain was originally published in the New Yorker in a slightly shorter form on October 13th 1997. It would go on to win the National Magazine Award in 1998 and 3rd place in the O. Henry Prize. The longer version of the story appeared in the short story collection, Close Range: Wyoming Stories.
As a shorter piece of fiction, it was perfect for screen adaptation. Author and screenwriter Larry McMurtry said in an essay that: “I was the more stunned when I read ‘Brokeback Mountain’ because I realized it was a story that had been sitting there all my life, fifty-five years of which have been lived in the American West.” He described the writing as “Spare, wire-fence prose that is congruent with the landscape itself, and with the struggling, bruised speech still to be heard today across the north plains.“
Of course the story went on to become a famous film, though it took years. A story about ‘gay cowboys’ was not exactly Hollywood fare.
Author background
Annie Proulx was born in 1935 and wrote her first story at the age of 10 while sick with chicken pox. She has a B.A. and an M.A. in history.
In her essay, Getting Movied, she wrote: As a student of history and a writer of fiction my interest has focused on social and economic change in rural communities – Vermont, Newfoundland, Texas, Wyoming. I am something of a geographical determinist, believing that regional landscapes, climate and topography dictate local cultural traditions and kinds of work, and thereby the events on which my stories are built. Landscape is central to this rural fiction.
Birth of a story
Great story ideas often have simple beginnings. Brokeback Mountain was born when Proulx noticed a middle-aged man in a Wyoming bar who appeared to be watching the younger men playing pool. She noted something in his expression, a bitter longing, that made her think he might be ‘country gay’. This in turn led to her wondering what it might be like for a man like this in rural Wyoming.
A few weeks later, the author listened to a homophobic bar-cafe owner ranting on about two ‘homos’ who had come in the night before for dinner. If the regulars had been in that night, ‘it would have gone badly for them’.
Brokeback Mountain was built on the back of these experiences, the plot following two young country boys in a homophobic environment who also suffered from internalised homophobia themselves.
She chose the sixties as the time period which would give both characters the right background and experience. The characters were also not cowboys as such, though they longed for the cowboy life. Instead, they herded sheep (an animal looked down on by real cowboys), while neither later went on to be top hands. Even Jack’s rodeo riding never landed him success. Screenwriter McMurtry saw Jack and Ennis in the long American tradition of doomed young men, also seen in the likes of The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises.
Proulx would write the story over a period of roughly six months, going through more than sixty drafts. She did most of the ‘writing’ when she was driving. One curve in the road became the place where Ennis’s parents died in the story. The scene where Jack and Ennis meet up and kiss after four years came to her when she was driving past a cement plant of all places. To perfectly capture the scene where Ennis holds Jack and rocks him back and forth, she played a piece of music over and over. It was a very difficult scene to write and she wanted to nail it.
The story had several working titles before she settled on the final one: “The Pleasures of Whiskey Mountain,” “Bulldust Mountain,” “Swill-Swallow Mountain,” and “Drinkard Mountain”. They don’t seem quite right now. Brokeback Mountain was the right choice.
Location
Time and place are central to Brokeback Mountain. From the characters’ dialect (including Jack’s switch to some Texan pronunciations later), to their impoverished backgrounds, their direct interaction with nature and the mountain, and the social attitudes of their time.
In her essay Movied, Proulx talks about the importance of location. The mountain itself would force the two men together. It would also represent the happiest time of their lives. Their infrequent meetings in the following two decades would mostly take place in the wilderness. Away from the prying eyes of townsfolk, they could be themselves.
Weather is also important – the wind blows through the opening section of the story, where an older Ennis wakes up in his trailer, about to move on to a new location, but warmed by the dream he just had of Jack.
Prose Style
Brokeback Mountain is written in a compact and spare style where a single sentence can travel a long distance.
They were raised on small, poor ranches in opposite corners of the state, Jack Twist in Lightning Flat up on the Montana border, Ennis del Mar from around Sage, near the Utah line, both high school dropout country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life.
This is just one example of Proulx’s style, squeezing a lot of information into a single long sentence of several lines.
The story’s POV is also omniscient, though mostly seen from Ennis’s perspective. We get comments about the characters that could be the author or another character’s thoughts – such as when Joe Aguirre hires the two and after giving them their instructions, we’re told after his speech: Pair of deuces going nowhere.
Usually omniscient is best avoided, but it doesn’t seem to interfere with the narrative in this case.
Aftermath
The film was immensely popular and Proulx particularly felt Heath Ledger was the perfect Ennis. But the film would also trigger a huge amount of fan fiction, some of it quite explicit. Proulx would later claim she regretted writing the story owing to the manuscripts she received. Fans, usually men, would rewrite the ending, offering a happier outcome or even a new relationship for Ennis. This frustrated the author who felt the fans were missing the point of the story. It was not about Jack and Ennis but about destructive rural homophobia. Given the subject matter and period, a happy ending would be out of place. It would also miss the entire point of the closing lines of the story:
There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.
Conclusion
Simple ideas can lead to powerful stories. Brokeback Mountain is a perfect example. I recommend the book below which includes essays from Annie Proulx herself as well as the two screenwriters. The full story and the screenplay are also included.
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