WRITING IN YOUR SEVENTIES AND BEYOND

Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey (One Flew Over The Coo Coo's Nest) quit writing, he said, because he couldn't "keep all the balls in the air" anymore. Some of his problem, no doubt, can be attributed to his love of acid and marijuana, but some of it might have to do with age.

Today, and for the past week, I've been struggling to polish off an essay I call "Tom Brokaw's Identity Crisis". The problem I'm having feels like the ordinary problem of any any writer...that is to organize my material in an effective and interesting way, but it's a problem complicated by advancing years. 

I clearly recall all the years when the entire sense and flow of a very long piece of writing stayed in my head while I slept and came back to me as soon as I sat at my typewriter (i.e. computer). This was a result of the faculty for "concentration" that puts a writer into an intense mental state that allows his subconscious to guide and inform his writing.

Well...the concentration is gone. Every day whatever I'm writing might just as well be a new piece of work for all my subconsciousness is concerned. I'm a stranger to it when I awake, and I struggle to arrange the paragraphs into an effective display. 

I guess what I write these days might be a little less organized than in the past, but I hope the words strike closer to the truth than in those days when I got more caught up in arranging the paragraphs.