Marisa Linton on becoming a fiction writer after sixty
Looking back, it seems inevitable that I would become a fantasy writer, right from when I read my first book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. My big sister and I were in our back garden. I still remember the blue cover, and Pauline Baynes’s drawing of Mr Beaver (what’s a beaver? I wondered) peering out from behind a tree. I begged my sister to read the story aloud. She got through the first page, then wandered off. So, I picked up the book, and struggled through the words, because I was so eager to find out what happened. There was no stopping me after that. I read The Lord of the Rings because my big brother said it was like The Hobbit, taking the volumes one by one from the local library. I was only eight, though a precocious reader, and I skimmed parts I found difficult – about elves and battles – because I was so keen to find out what happened to Frodo, Sam and Gollum. Sam became my first book hero. I went on to other books, a lifetime of reading. To be a writer of fiction was my teenage dream – but I lacked the self-belief to go for it. Other things got in the way too – like the need to earn a living. Writing fiction is a notoriously precarious profession.
I became fascinated by history, especially the French Revolution, my other great literary love. I went on to have a successful career as a historian; teaching, researching and writing scholarly books. But in 2019 my career came to a premature end when the university where I’d taught for twenty-six years closed its history department. I found myself, aged 60, an unemployed history professor, still with many things I wanted to write, but no paid employment, and just a pension to live on. I don’t want to minimise the awfulness of redundancy. But I was determined to see my unemployed state as an opportunity, a liberation from working to someone else’s tune. We get one life, one chance. I asked myself what I’d always secretly wanted to do. The answer was easy. Write publishable fiction. I decided to go for it.
What to write? I turned to a story I’d written years earlier for my daughters when they were small, but put aside as unpublishable. It took inspiration from the classic fantasies I’d loved as a child. Now I rewrote it, giving my youthful protagonists a twenty-first century edge that would probably have astonished – and horrified – Lewis and Tolkien. But we have to write for our own time, and in a way that readers now can relate to.
It was an odd experience to go from the top of my field as an academic to being a complete newbie in an altogether different writing world. I think it was good for me, it stretched my mind and capabilities in new ways. I found it liberating to ditch the footnotes and let my imagination fly. One thing is the same though – the discipline of spending a large part of each day and much of your thought, in the business of creating something that had not previously existed, writing it down, and sending it out into the world.
Once you’ve finished your novel, you need to secure a literary agent. Every agent I tried turned my story down, or just didn’t reply. So I wrote a new novel, this one for adults, and sent it out. Again, I failed to get taken on. Almost everyone who goes into novel-writing has similar experiences, of indifference and rejection. It’s a tough industry. But I kept thinking, this is what I want to do. I had to keep going.
Then, in 2023, I entered my original novel into the Times/Chicken House competition. Almost 1,000 people also entered, most of them much younger than me. I felt a fraud. You’re how old? When they announced my book had won, I couldn’t take it in at first. It was too momentous. At 63, a new life had opened up for me. And I’d made it happen. My advice for anyone reading this – if you want a writing career in later life badly enough, and you’re prepared to work for it, never give up. It’s not easy. But you will meet some great people, and begin a whole new part of your life.
Some academic colleagues were baffled by my transition into writing fiction. Several suggested I publish under a pseudonym, to ‘compartmentalise’ my writing identity, as though popular fantasy aimed at a younger generation would somehow taint the value of my scholarly work. Oddly enough, some of Lewis and Tolkien’s academic colleagues took a similarly dim view of their forays into fantasy writing. But I say – why not write both? Because both are part of who I am.
THE BINDING SPELL by Marisa Linton is out now in paperback (£8.99, Chicken House)
