From my (paying) professional experience, there are always two parts to communication:
1. Knowing what you want to say
2. Being able to get that across

As regards fiction:
You need to live for 1.
You need to work for 2.

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ps: Communication as in uni-directional communication, as in telling not discussing. The art of fiction might become a tad scary if readers were allowed to ask questions as they went along...

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pps: That is, if they were allowed to ask questions and to expect an answer...

I think that's bang on.

And can I say that beginners often underestimate how hard 2) is? The drive to do 1) is so strong. Soooo much of learning to be a better writer is actually learning to read what you've written as others will, and re-write it accordingly. Which is where WW comes in...

Emma

I agree about living life first, although at 62 I think I may have left things rather late to take on writing as a career. I did make a start earlier on non-fiction, in a brief sabbatical from teaching, although even that required some experience, even if only of watching a lot of films and learning about another culture at close quarters.

Yes, it's good to read the books of people like Hemingway and Steinbeck, but they are inheritors of the American Frontier tradition of life as action or hardship or at least of moving about quite a lot. If I'm not mistaken England's favourite author is Jane Austen who hardly ever left the village where she lived in genteel respecability, apart from the odd heavily chaperoned visit to southern watering holes like Bath and Lyme Regis, or the more respectable neighbourhoods of London.

I wouldn't be too dismissive of the value of writing imitations of other writers' work - not in the Dan Brown sense, but I was thinking of early works by writers like Austen who started her career writing pastiches of the popular genres of the day.

Surely there's as much place for writers who live fairly sheltered conventional lives but whose inner resources may be very well developed as for those whose circumstances have been, shall we say, more colourful.

Sheila

at 62 I think I may have left things rather late to take on writing as a career

Nonsense. What are you going to do when you retire?

Besides, if the doomsayers are correct about the looming pension problems, you will have a massive and untapped market of grey-haired readers who cannot afford to get their entertainment anywhere else! :O

I don't think it matters what your life was if there is enough in it to make your characters believable and interesting in the situations you place them. I think I'm right in saying that Holst (writer of some impressive orchestral pieces) was a slightly inadequate music teacher at a girl's school. Equally, I am not aware of Orwell actually leading a socialist revolution that turned sour and ended up with him "retiring" his former loyal friends.

And what about Mary Wesley? - first novel published at 70!

Holst (writer of some impressive orchestral pieces) was a slightly inadequate music teacher at a girl's school.

He was head of music at St Paul's Girls' School for about 10 years, and did a pretty impressive job, if I remember the reminiscences of Old Paulinas during my time there correctly.

Writers and other artists have always had to earn some of their bread in other ways. Shakespeare was an actor, after all, and most composers teach. Another way of tackling it is to wait until you're financially established - which means older rather than younger. Why not? You've got so much more to say, and so many more ways of saying it.

Emma

Oh, I'm already retired and have spent a year writing, mainly in the mornings. I know I'm not too old to write fiction, but I'm foolish enough to be doing two Journalism courses at present, so have put the fictio on hold. One of them is a film course run by the BFI, mainly distance learning, but we had a two-day seminar the other week - all forty students assembled to listen to talks and watch a film to review later. Every one else was about half my age!

Most of the retirees I know are quite well-heeled and swan off to exotic locations to gawp and chat to the locals and and one another, but you are right that there ought to be a large readership amongst the elderly poor in the future.

D.H. Lawrence was a teacher in Croydon and hated it - I remember reading a poem he wrote called something like 'Last Lesson on Friday Afternoon' with which I could empathise. Roddy Doyle lasted a lot longer in Dublin and seems to have enjoyed teaching.

I've gained the impression that to be a journalist you either have to have a private income or live rent-free with your parents.

Sheila

I've gained the impression that to be a journalist you either have to have a private income or live rent-free with your parents

Or write fiction to appeal to the lowest common denominator and pretend it is journalism à la Jeremy Clarkson.

I'm a bit ignorant, that is to say a lot ignorant, when it comes to Jeremy Clarkson. Didn't he write a column about cars for something like the Sunday Times? I always thought they were fairly factual, test drives and the like.

Sheila

Technically, he is a car journalist. Actually, his typical output is creative writing. Case in point being an article on a Merc last week, I think he may have mentioned the car somewhere towards the end of the third last paragraph. The rest of it was about the difficulty of living in the modern world...

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Which translates as:
"Despite my evident bigotry, prejudice and snobbery; I still read the guy."

Which translates as:
"There is a market for anything, if you write it to a standard."

I think you've put your finger on why I have read his pieces. It's not as if I have a particular interest in cars, except when I need to get a new one, and then I'm not in the market for a fancy performer. I'd be more inclined to reach for 'What Car?' then, stifling a yawn the while.

Oh dear, I've read the Anita Brookner and I've not even got to the airport. This just goes that you can write about almost nothing and gather a readership.

Sheila

There are some very interesting views on here and I am so pleased to have joined this site (well hope to).

I suspect that the type of genre you are trying to write dictates if, and how much, life experience you might need. Jane Austen was able to write the sort of books she did as they are largely magnificent social commentaries based on her experience (I imagine). The same probably applies to somebody like a Dickens. Of course, on the other hand, science fiction is completely imaginative. And, as somebody else suggested, Hemingway and Steinbeck were arguably a product of their times.

Somebody mentioned embarrassment about 18 year-old authors (sorry, I haven't scrolled back to see who it was). However I do agree with that. I am a solicitor and I also am a bit incredulous when I come across early-20s practitioners straight out of university dealing with some incredibly personal issues for some clients (divorce, custody and access to kids etc). I do wonder sometimes why they are allowed to do it. Having said that, I guess I was there once and I got through it alright. I apologise for the personal digression.

the type of genre you are trying to write dictates if, and how much, life experience you might need

Personally, I don't believe life experience is optional for any form of fiction, but I think people sometimes view it too narrowly.

they are largely magnificent social commentaries based on her experience

Somewhere in From Pitch to Publication, Carole Blake heads off on a minor rant about people writing about what they know; the argument was something along the lines that a turgid and dull environment does not translate to good fiction no matter how good you are at writing.

She seemed to counsel, and I believe, that the important part is to understand how people behave and then to transfer the story to somewhere that excites you - this is true as much for Mills&Boon trash as for science-fiction as for Will Self's intellectual experiments as for high literature.

To bring it nearer to home, EmmaD writes about a time and environment that she can't possibly have experienced (assuming the photo on her website is genuine...) and my own writing is about a million metaphors from my real life. The point is to understand where the parallels are so that you can guess (believably) about what might happen if...

Posting on a recent thread, I found I wanted to reformulate write about what you know as write about what you can make real. Some of the reality does come from what you know, but that can be heartbreak, joy, sex, jealousy, war, not the deeply ordinary life of a single mother in South East London. That's where age and experience help; you need to understand how human life ticks, and to have met enough of them to be able to imagine out from my knowledge to create real-seeming other lives in other times. Compared to getting that right, finding out how the right period of ship would be rigged is a doddle. (Though heaven help you if you get it wrong. The naval-hist-fic readers are the most ferociously picky of the lot.)

Emma

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getting one's pronouns right, on the other hand, is clearly beyond me this morning.

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EmmaD writes about a time and environment that she can't possibly have experienced (assuming the photo on her website is genuine...)

Didn't anyone ever tell you not to believe everything you find on the Net? ;)