Advice to Retirees Who Want to Write

Happy 65th Birthday!

About ten weeks ago, the day before my sixty-fifth birthday, a freshly-inked Medicare card in my wallet, I joined the ranks of the retired, and I told everyone who asked that I was going to become a full-time writer. I’m still a newbie, perhaps a wannabe, in the writer biz, but I’ll pass along the following advice, based on my experiences thus far.

Throughout your working career, perhaps you’ve harbored an inner desire to be an author, but the day job, family, and your chosen vices have conspired to suppress your creative energies. All these years, you’ve carried in your head the next great American novel or the screenplay for the next big sweep-the-Oscars blockbuster. You’ve scribbled bits and pieces of your masterwork, penned an occasional short story or poem. Now, having decided on retirement, the time has come to ask yourself: Can you actually follow through with all this? Can you actually be a writer?

Your New Job

“Maybe when I retire….” All your working life, you’ve said this.

First things first: that “maybe” has to go.

You must either dedicate yourself to writing or accept that, sooner rather than later, you’ll be painting precast-plaster teddy bear cookie jars in primary colors, the same six colors that came with your kindergarten Crayolas.

Writing is not a hobby, not a pastime; it’s your job now. Every weekday morning, my alarm goes off at the same time it did when I was a working stiff. I get up and go through exactly the same routine. I make coffee. When the newspaper arrives, I do the Sudoku. After a bowl of granola and yogurt, I shower, shave, and get dressed, exactly as if I still worked for a paycheck.

Keeping to your old familiar regimen is essential. By getting dressed for work, you fall into that habitual frame of mind that says, “You are going to work. You’ve got a job to do.” And you do. Your new job is a real job. It’s called being a writer.

The Workplace

In addition to a morning routine, you’ve also had a workplace; and for this new job, it’s no different. Having decided to be a writer, you need a place to write. It has to be a place where you feel comfortable, can concentrate, and where, from the moment you enter, you have a single purpose: to write.

Coffee shops are great places to write, but not a Starbucks. That’d be like Virginia Woolf at KFC or Hemingway drinking Coors. It must be an indie coffee shop with simple tables and straight back chairs, one step or less above Salvation-Army-grade. The customers must look like they are there to get stuff done: hunched over computers, deep into a book, or absorbed in serious conversation, foreheads nearly touching across their tables.

Ideally, it will be a place where writers hang out. You’ll know them because they look so damned serious, filling pages of their journals with minute handwriting or doggedly typing words onto a laptop’s screen that when you sneak a peek is not Gmail, not Facebook, but paragraphs or stanzas. They’ll have The Thinker’s posture and the focused expression of the bronze fellow beating swords into plowshares in front of the UN.

What if there are no writers in sight? Find a mirror and in its frame notice how much you look like someone who just stepped from a dust jacket. Step up to the counter (the line is never long), order a coffee, and walk to your table with the feeling that you’ve just rented one mug’s worth of office space.

Another workplace possibility is your thirty-year-old daughter’s bedroom, unused for a decade. Box up the stuffed animals, and paint over the powder-blue walls and hand-stenciled stars and planets. Choose a color of paint that will not clash with those on the spines of the many literary tomes that you’ll load into the bookcase, exiling all of your daughter’s YA fiction titles to the book buyer. Move in a hundred-year-old rolltop desk given to you by friends abandoning their houses to move into independent living. Turn over the brass light overhead with its green glass shade, and open your laptop on the 100-year-old desktop. Admire it as the very definition of anachronism. Fill the cubbyholes once reserved for important papers with little ceramic, turf-roofed cottages and snow globes. Thus transformed, the room has become your own, a place you will call “your studio,” separate from the room downstairs called the “den” where you will continue to do your bill paying, bookkeeping, Facebooking, emailing, and Amazon ordering. Without exception, your studio needs to be just for writing.

Coffee shops may not be for you: you grew up when a cup of coffee cost a quarter, so there’s no way you’re going to pay three bucks. You may not wish to take over your millennial daughter’s bedroom either; she may still be living there. Your choice of space and place is entirely yours. Now that you’re a writer, you’re your own boss. Get used to it.

Your New Boss

Of course, you don’t start out as your own boss. For the beginning full-time writer, there’s a mandatory probationary period during which you’ll be at the mercy of the ultimate boss from hell, Procrastination. Procrastination is already waiting for you with long lists of things to do other than write. After all, in all those years you’ve shirked the urge to write, you’ve also put off cleaning the attic, fixing the gutters, running two miles a day, going to the gym regularly, and repainting your daughter’s bedroom. The only way to escape Procrastination is to go to your workplace and write. Even there, though, you are not entirely safe.

At the coffee shop, you will be tempted to check Facebook or check emails. So, disconnect your computer from the shop’s WiFi. It’s an unsecured network anyway; you don’t want your Great American Novel getting hacked by the Great American Bodice-Ripper.

At home, you will be tempted to leave your rolltop to wander the house or raid the fridge. You’ll reach an impasse in your writing and the next thing you know, you’ll have  wandered from your desk onto the back porch. This condition is known as “procrastinambulism.” There are many cures, but there’s only one that works. You need to purchase a bag of little green army men; it must also contain an army tank, some sections of barbed wire fence, and a machine gun emplacement or two. Set a chair squarely in the doorway of your studio. You needn’t close the door. Deploy your olive drab army in a skirmish line on the seat of the chair, all weapons aimed to defend the doorway against anyone who approaches. I have found this an amazingly effective deterrent. I don’t know why, but if it works for me, it will surely work for you.

How long does this probationary period last? I don’t know. I’ve only been retired a couple months.

Your MFA

You don’t have one. You are told (by others and yourself) that you must have one or, at the very least, a BA in English. The last English class you took was your sophomore year in college, and it was the class that convinced you for good to become a chemist, teacher, engineer, truck driver, or dumpster diver. Anything but a writer.

Be sure that at some point in your probationary period, you will encounter a crisis during which you must overcome your angst regarding MFAs. Perhaps a friend who is not a writer will suggest that you attend a generative workshop in which the facilitator, a friend of hers, will give the group a prompt. For the next thirty minutes you and the others will freewrite a story or poem in response, after which all will be offered the opportunity to share. The facilitator has both an MFA and a PhD, so certainly her workshop will improve your writing process.

The workshop will begin with a round robin of introductions. Panic will set in as it becomes increasingly apparent that all the other attendees are students in, or graduates of, the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. As the round robin bears down on you, an epiphany occurs. Sure, these young Turks have survived a few semesters of intensely competitive pedagogy. You, however, have decades of experience in the Hobbesian, Darwinian American workplace. You’ve known success and failure, insult and praise; you’ve felt smart but acted like a fool and played the fool to outmaneuver the stupid.

This, you realize, is no time to tremble like the Cowardly Lion. You must be the Scarecrow and listen to your inner Wizard, who says, “They have only one thing you lack. A diploma!” When your turn comes, you proudly introduce yourself as a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop of Hard Knocks.

Will you, a retiree, succeed as a writer? I cannot say, but here’s one thing I can do. Like the Wizard (who, like me, presented himself full of bluster), I confer upon you this diploma in honor of all the qualities you bring, as one experienced in life and brimming with its stories, to your new job. Get to work. Write. Best wishes.

About the Author: Joe Alan Artz

Joe Alan Artz, a retired archaeologist, lives in Iowa City, Iowa, with his wife Cherie, also an archaeologist. His short fiction mostly follows the pattern indicated by a remark once made to him by a friend: “Joe, someday you’ll die of terminal free association.” That is to say, ideas for a story often begin with an event or object and follow a randomly wandering course from there until a character leaps from nowhere to take charge and lead the way to an actual plot. His fiction and creative nonfiction can be found in print in The Wapsipinicon Almanac, Beecher’s Magazine, and The MacGuffin. For Joe’s online publications, check out “Midnight Chipmunks,” “The Grove of Dictionaries,” and “When the Sun Melted the Shadows,” all from PromptPress; “I Meet Mary,” as part of the Diverse Arts Project; and “Corner Table.”