Notes from an ageing writer
Ian Ridley on late flourishing, short novels, agents, publishing, indie publishing and NOT marketing a book
“I get tired of ‘Under 40’ lists. Show me someone who got their PhD at 60 after losing everything. Give me the 70-year-old debut novelist who writes from a lifetime of love and grief. Give me calloused hands and tender hearts.”
WHEN I first read that quote by the American writer Doug Murano, it resonated immediately and intensely. Now I read it again, I’m not so sure. I didn’t get a PhD at 60 after losing everything. Also, I may not be quite 70 and I’m not a debut novelist. I don’t have calloused hands, either, like my father did after a lifetime of labour.
But all pedantry (that can be the enemy of creativity) aside, I reckon I come pretty damn close. I certainly felt I’d lost everything when my wife Vikki Orvice died on 6 February 2019 of secondary breast cancer, aged just 56. And somehow I managed to apply for, and was accepted on, a crime and thriller writing course at Cambridge University, where I graduated in 2023 at the age of 68 with a Masters - and a Distinction, no less.
(Well, if you can’t big yourself up on your own website, and with chances running out to do so at this time of life, where and when can you?)
Ten years back now, Vikki had encouraged me to write my first novel, a thriller entitled The Outer Circle, and it took me a while before it was finally published by Unbound in 2018. I was glad she was still alive to read it, being an inspiration for one of the characters. Then when I got to Cambridge, I began developing a second novel, a whodunit set in the world of newspapers - write what you know – using that character, an investigative journalist named Jan Mason. It was called Don’t Talk and, published in November 2022, it became book two in the Jan series after I secured the rights back from Unbound, rebranded and republished my first book as Outer Circle.
While at Cambridge, I also had an idea for a short novel in a more literary genre. Which is where the love, grief and a tender heart that Doug Murano speaks of, along with metaphorically calloused hands, comes in.
After Vikki died, and gripped by writing paralysis, I spent a summer watching county cricket. Seeing the action gently unfold before me prompted in me observations, thoughts and feelings about my state of pain and aloneness. The result, penned over the winter, was a book entitled The Breath of Sadness: On love, grief and cricket. When I’d finished, been through professional edits by a wonderful editor who didn’t dilute it, it really felt like the best I could do and I would never write anything better. V was definitely with me, sitting at my shoulder, during its writing.
A year on from ‘Breath’ - published in the summer of 2020 some 18 months on from Vikki’s death - and also while at Cambridge, I came to realise that I still had observations, thoughts and feelings about grief. It is, after all, ever evolving. The talk is of the five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – but anyone who has lost someone close, especially the love of their life, will tell you that it is not that simple and not that linear. All the states apply but I felt I moved in and out of each. Often on the same day. And the sadness never left me, just waxed and waned in its intensity. It was like contemplating a brooding multi-coloured painting that filled the wall of a gallery and which changed appearance, hues and perspective as you walked from side to side.
I began writing down observations, thoughts and feelings again, as I had done when watching cricket that summer. I wanted to write about a time when the initial madness of grief had abated but the sadness remained, and I was learning – as my therapist put it – to walk with a limp.
Having written ‘Breath’ though, I didn’t want to follow it up with another non-fiction memoir. Second books on the same subject are rarely the literary equivalent of The Godfather II and I didn’t want to invite unfavourable comparisons. And I had learned skills on my Masters course, of plot and structure, of hooks and twists. In addition, during the pandemic, I had also read a lot of short literary novels that had moved and inspired me, such as Anita Brookner’s Hotel Du Lac, Claudia Piñeiro’s Elena Knows, JL Carr’s A Month in the Country and Graham Swift’s Here We Are. John Banville’s astonishing The Sea about a man losing his wife to breast cancer also fuelled me. As did an article I came across online about pilgrimage for the bereaved.
The combination prompted in me a desire to write a novel about a widower almost three years on from the death of his wife. Of course there were going to be elements that were autobiographical but I wanted to use my imagination also to create a story – using techniques developed at Cambridge relating to structure, hooks and twists – that engaged and entertained as well as contained experiences of grief that might be valuable. I wanted to write of a time after the initial rawness of The Breath of Sadness had abated that is rarely written about and when the bereaved can find themselves alone with their stripped-down selves anew.
The plot involves a widower, one Luke Jessop, finding love letters to his late wife Billie, one telling of a break-up, from her first lover, Adam. It sparks in Luke a desire to meet the man and so he embarks on a trip to Italy, where Adam now lives – and near a holiday hotel that he and Billie used to frequent and which he wishes to revisit. Adam, however, will refuse to speak to him and Luke will meet a woman who unsettles his life of quiet desperation.
I sent it to an agent I followed on X (formerly Twitter) and liked the look and sound of, Oli Munson from the AM Heath agency. He liked it enough to take it on and send it to various publishing houses. Some of the feedback was really encouraging and my hopes rose. Take this from one of the ‘Big Five’ publishers.
“I thought it was so well done – really beautifully written and strangely compelling. And I’m a sucker for the setting and the emotion was so good here too. But it felt more driven by character development than plot development and so felt to me like it was more one for a more literary list.”
And so Oli sent it to the literary imprint of a ‘Big Five’. Back came this reply:
“Ian writes beautifully and elegantly and I enjoyed the astuteness of the observations throughout. And there is something extremely moving about Luke’s quest, as you say: his self-doubt, and the time that has passed since Billie’s death, time in which he has been berating himself, and going back over what he should have done. Much as I found to admire about it, though, I don’t feel […] that I’m the right editor to take this forward. I’m sorry to pass in this instance, but thank you so much for giving me the chance to read and consider it.”
After a fair bit of such feedback, when Oli felt he had exhausted his close contacts, I tried some small indie publishers. Again, some nice comments but nobody would take it on. Time was marching on. I was getting older. And, like Vikki, I have a secondary cancer, although less virulent than was hers.
Perhaps I didn’t fit a profile of what publishers are looking for these days. Debates rage within the industry and on social media about profiles, both of professional and aspiring writers. The majority of editors (like the majority of readers) now seem to be women. There is also a need to give a platform to ethnic minority writers. That 60-year-old PhD, the 70-year-old debut novelist with calloused hands, is lower down the pecking order now, it feels to this male one.
None of which I am bitter about and all of which I understand. I was fortunate to have a good career writing books, sports books at least, alongside being a Fleet Street journalist at a time when there was some decent money being offered as advances. It genuinely is time for new faces and new voices to be heard.
Besides, perhaps the book simply wasn’t good enough. Except that I think it is. And just because you age, it doesn’t mean you run out of things to say. Actually, I reckon it means you have more. Sometimes, it feels as if some younger people see those older and think they should step aside as they have had their time. Some comments about the ageing during the Covid pandemic were outrageously cruel. But they, we, have our stories still, stories accumulated through pain and sorrow, wisdom and experience.
I wasn’t going to simply accept defeat. I would publish the book through my own little independent company, V Books. But I would do it professionally, with the same editor I trusted with ‘Breath’ in Charlotte Atyeo, formerly of Bloomsbury, a great cover designer in Steve Leard and an experienced typesetter, and release a book that was the fruit of a lifetime’s accumulation of emotional ups and downs, in life, writing and publishing.
That, in many ways, was the easy bit. Or at least the enjoyable bit, however much many of us know the pain and slog of writing, especially deeply emotional books, before comes that pleasure and satisfaction of having written.
For the tiring thing for a later-life novelist is less the writing of the book and more the promotion of the bloody thing. Sending it out to potential reviewers, trying to get coverage anywhere you can, podcasts, radio and TV, constant tweets – or posts as they’re now called on X - and other social media, such as Facebook and Instagram. And prevailing on your kids to see if they can interest a Tik Tok influencer.
You do it because you believe in the book and want people to read what you’ve dredged your soul to find. Because you feel you have something that might add a little insight into the human condition. Maybe you, we, dream of a bestseller, fame and money but that’s not where it starts. It starts with that compulsion to tell a good tale. Publication and marketing are just elements of a desire to be heard.
This time, with Dark Clouds Bring Waters, I have decided to do only a little of all that, because, I confess, I am weary of all the embarrassing self-promotion that is, usually reluctantly, thrust upon all authors - save for the very elite - if they want their voice out there, rather than suffer the fate of being published without trace.
I have announced my book on social media and post about it intermittently if the time feels right. I’ve written this piece for potential readers in order to explain some things. I’ve even commissioned a short blog tour of online reviewers who might spread the word and generate a few sales, either on my website or Amazon. Unless it somehow takes off, it is unlikely to find a home in anything but the odd kind little indie bookshop.
It would be lovely if this book – described by my generous editor as “a quietly tender novella about facing the ghosts of the past and finding new ways forward. Lovely stuff.” – just found a word-of-mouth readership. If it touched someone’s life and they let me, and others, know on social media or by leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads. That, after all has been the purpose of writing it. That and, as my editor discerned, facing the ghosts of the past and finding new ways forward.
In a way, this does feel like a debut novel. I stepped out of the comfortable place where I wrote sports books into crime writing, to which I plan to return soon. From there, I stretched myself again by allying plot and structure to emotion and analysis. I will leave others to decide if it has been worth it; if an old bloke’s love and grief, calloused hands and tender heart, do indeed have a place in the modern writing firmament. All I do know for sure is that it has been worth it for me.
