Noise and Sparks:
The Legend of the
Kick-Arse Wise Women

Ruth EJ Booth

This is how I thought it went:

You live first. You learn. You travel, explore the world, find your niche. You get the job. You find the one. You settle down, get married, have kids. Discover a whole new way of looking at things. Then – once you’ve done all that, once the kids are gone, and you’ve this huge wodge of life experience in the bank – that’s when you get to write.

And I was happy with that. Even as the rest of my childhood dream crumbled, and the urge to write became insistent, I held onto the idea that the fun of writing fiction was for retirement. You needed experience to draw on to write with authority. And besides, without a pension to support me, how could I afford the time to do it?

These sound like excuses, but this was what I genuinely believed. I’d seen all those celebrated women writers on TV – the Ursula Le Guins, the Maya Angelous – all older women. It made sense it took a lifetime’s worth of experience to write something true and universal. I was prepared to wait, if that’s what it took to be that cool.

But I’d made three mistakes. The first was confusing the mastery of older writers for the wisdom of age, not the product of years spent honing their craft. The second was giving in to my fears. And the third, arguably the most important, was this: you don’t get to choose when you have something to say.

The first will be familiar to anyone who’s tried writing fiction. It springs partly from a common misconception: writing is easy, because it’s something we all learned in school. The lie becomes obvious the moment you put pen to paper: writing takes years to master. Discouraging as it seems, it’s a liberating lesson. There are no age restrictions. You can start at any time. All it takes is a willingness to work hard.

And hard it is: frustrating, sometimes to the point of tears, to spend hours crafting the perfect sentence, only to receive rejection after rejection upon sending it out. Embittering, if you can’t resist comparing the success of your peers to your own, instead of celebrating with them. But these are distractions. There’s an intrinsic joy in the act of creation, in making something that lives in the mind and in the heart: the very root of a love of writing.

Hard work didn’t deter me. It’s strange to think of it now: in my late twenties, freelance music writing, I’d try creating the odd bit of fan fiction, even sketching original ideas, and find myself absorbed by the work. But I’d never have any intention of taking them further. That was for later. Nor was I comparing myself to others – I had no connection to the fiction scene – but, because of that, no way of challenging my beliefs either.

Feminist readers may consider my childhood image misogynistic, as only allowing women their liberty once their reproductive use has passed. What I was conscious of was needing to tick those boxes of traditional womanhood first. Really, I couldn’t wait to become one of those silver-haired kick-arse women.

But as I wrote those first tentative stories, my respect for experience warped into a mask for my fear of ridicule: less concerned that I was unready to write, more that people would know this if I tried. Respect must be earned – but surely no one could argue with experience! That was why new bands got heckled, wasn’t it? That was why young academics in my old department played games of one-upmanship with their visiting peers, right? I wouldn’t have to worry about wasting my time if I waited. They couldn’t criticize me then.

If social media teaches us anything, it’s that neither acclaim nor ability stops scorn. You may be a best-selling author, movie options coming out of your ears, but even Joanne Harris and J. K. Rowling experience daily trolling. Paying your dues doesn’t end that. But again, I’d yet to see any of this. So, I’d just write the occasional story for my guildmates, get creative with music journalism, or devise alternative lyrics on fan forums. Just a bit of fun, I’d think, little realizing I was writing already.

See, I hadn’t twigged that inspiration wasn’t waiting ‘til I hit my 60s. There’s a reason for that – inspiration is the mind at work. The artistic process isn’t simply triggered by breaching some experience threshold. It’s the way we interpret the world around us, and process what’s happened, allowing us to move on. To build up life experience without ever digesting it is akin to spending our lives eating, carting around our swollen bellies, and taking one glorious dump at the end of it all. However literally you take that, that can’t be healthy.

And it had already begun to trickle out. All these things I’d been making, yet I hadn’t realised I was already writing. Still I held back.

In the end, what made me abandon my plan was the death of my Grandmother. One of the original kick-arse wise ones for me, our Grandmother-from-Hell passed away after a lengthy illness, mid-way through an Art History course. She was so enthusiastic about it. She’d always put off going to university.

Her death knocked me for six, not least because we kids had always expected her to live forever. It gave the lie to my idea of the endless time I’d have at the end of my life to do the things I loved. I realised I really couldn’t wait to become a kick-arse woman. There was only here and now.

So, I began to write in earnest. And once I did, things began to change. I started to think more clearly. I felt more comfortable in myself. The barrier I’d always felt between myself and the musicians I interviewed melted away – and with that, the other lies I’d held onto.

I realised I didn’t need to earn the right to write, except by hard work. And I could have fun doing that! As I gained confidence and started going to conventions, I found a welcoming community of creative people who understood how I felt, friends whose company I hope I’ll treasure for the rest of my life. To this day, I still wonder why I felt I had to wait to be this happy. I suspect I’ll be unpacking that for years to come.

I still intend to be a silver-haired kick-arse wise woman when I’m older. I just don’t want to have to wait ‘til then to be content with my life. It’s a choice that involves a lot of graft; a lot of frustration too, at times. Yet, unlike my age, the sheer luck involved in becoming successful, or the reactions of other people, that’s one thing I can control.

Ruth EJ Booth is a BSFA award-winning author and academic, studying on the MLitt in Fantasy at the University of Glasgow. Her work can be found at www.ruthbooth.com