Do you feel you identify with a particular generation? Technically my family falls into Boomer (husband), Gen X (me), and Gen Z (our three children). Oh, and then there is the Silent Generation grandparents. If you believe the marketing people, we are all in some way at war with each other. Apparently, Boomers have taken all the world resources, Gen Z are snowflakes and part of the wokerati out to correct us uninformed older folk, Gen X are often referred to as the squeezed middle. I’m not sure what the Silent Generation’s part is in all this - perhaps because they keep mum.
(I find this picture adorable - I hope you do too!)
I think we should stop slapping on the labels. It’s fine for statistical articles among sociologists but let’s get it out of the media. They suggest divisions where there shouldn’t be any. The most ridiculous in our family is between my husband and I - we are a team, not two people either side of a generational divide. OK, I might tease him that he was alive for England winning the World Cup and I only made it just in time for the moon landings but that’s as far as it goes - culturally we are on the same page, travelling through life together.
Instead of generational labels, I’d prefer to think of us as linked people. I’m sure there was a name for that somewhere… What was it? Ho-hum… Oh, I found it down the back of the sofa with an old pound coin. The word was ‘family’.
There is another aspect of this which undermines creativity. Slicing and dicing the generations adds jagged edges that shouldn’t be there. If I don’t feel free to imagine my way up and down the age scale, I’ll be trapped writing books in a narrow age segment. I’m with Keats in thinking writers should have ‘negative capability’ where we can forget the self and imagine what it is like to be a bird or a billiard ball. Life is unfurling, growing, not boxing us up into vacuum packed servings.
So, if you are a publisher and read a really convincing voice of an elderly person in a story then find it is written by a twenty-year-old, that should be a reason to celebrate, not worry that it isn’t ‘their’ story. Same goes the other way round. If a ninety-year-old can cast themselves back into the shoes a primary aged kid now then I say hooray.
Here endeth my little grumble of the day.
In other news
I now have lovely new covers for the next parts of my Regency Secrets series. Here is #3 The Wordsworth Key. Watch my little cover reveal. I hope you like it!
You can preorder it here.
Oh dear, we are all othering each other much too much. Find things to admire and learn from in older generations, cherish and share with younger ones. I love having friends younger and older than I. It's so enriching.
No doubt a publisher will put my work in a neat category (if accepted). I remember one of my favorite books was A Wrinkle in Time. It appeared when I was 12. On the cover it said "12 and up. You can happily stretch that 'and up' to whatever your current age is." So true as I still enjoy rereading it.