Writing While Elderly
Okay, not elderly, exactly, but definitely of a certain age. Long past the age when women become invisible. Let’s just say vintage.
My debut novel, A Reluctant Spy, is due to be published in October. I applied to read the first chapter at Spring Writes, a literary arts festival, centered in Ithaca, NY, and was gratified to receive a Zoom slot.
The nice thing about Zoom is that you can practice 100 times before the event, record yourself, fix some of the awfulness before you put yourself out there, buy a new camera so you don’t look like the night of the living dead, and use the many Zoom video enhancements to give yourself, for example, eyebrows. Establish a good camera angle.
The real trouble with my public reading began when I watched the first practice Zoom recording and heard myself read. I had imagined a lively rendition that would slay the audience dead, but instead witnessed a low-pitched monotone that could render the watchers comatose. I appeared to exhibit a slight tremor—a horrifying old person’s voice—a breathless hitch, like it was running out of oomph, as if I, the reader, might expire at any moment.
“It needs more expression,” my husband said helpfully.
So I tried again, dredging up my elocution lessons from the previous century, raising the pitch of my voice to eliminate the death rattle, and trying to look more lively while maintaining my good angle. It was better, but still just an old lady droning on.
Did I mention that Chapter One is very exciting, full of action and terror? A skydiving jump gone wrong, where parachutes don’t open and characters plunge to Earth? And here I was, recounting events as if they were an afternoon snooze-fest.
What is a vintage writer to do? Something every red-blooded thriller writer does, I imagine—I threw my character—myself—a lifeline: permission to become someone else.
See me shriek like a banshee, roar like a lion, and weep like Lucia di Lammermoor! See me channeling Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, throwing my body in every direction to mirror the action in the novel. When my protagonist, Madeline, floated on her back during the skydive, I flung out my arms and became a butterfly. When the lines of her parachute became twisted, I was a ballerina, delicately spinning my hand and teasing the lines of the parachute apart. When my characters went into a catastrophic slingshot revolution, I dropped out of my chair and disappeared from the Zoom screen. Then, as Madeline lunged toward Mike in an effort to grab hold of him, I threw myself toward the camera, knocking it sideways and causing mayhem.
When Madeline, in the text, screamed at her husband Mike to use his reserve parachute, I screamed out her words. Then I SCREAMED and SCREAMED as Mike and Madeline plunged to Earth.
That is the story of my reading, how it morphed into an out-of-body performance, and my voice became an instrument of terror to my audience.
At the end, there was a breathless silence—my head still off-screen in the abyss—then audible gasping as I resurfaced, with many hands on thudding hearts.
Spice of life.
A triumph!
Plunging to Earth, with my characters in extremis, I had briefly become a thirty-year-old skydiver.
A moment of grace.
Score one for the Vintage Women of the Universe!