I may have been late to my writing career, but this is why it’s a blessing

There’s a clip of Jane Fonda doing the rounds on social media. Not a bad effort in itself for an 87-year-old. She’s accepting a lifetime achievement statuette at one of those endless award shows Hollywood creates as a way to get movie stars on our screens for free. She looks amazing – in that tight, shiny, slightly startled way common to ageing celebrities.

Jane Caro: “I didn’t write my first best-selling novel until I was 65.”Credit: James Brickwood

“I am a late bloomer,” she announces in her characteristically husky voice, “which is fine as long as you don’t miss the whole flower show.”

Apart from the fact that I reject the idea Fonda bloomed late – she’s been a movie star, activist and celebrity for as long as I can remember – her declaration resonated with me. I didn’t get my first book published until I was 50. I didn’t write my first best-selling novel until I was 65. I’ve just launched my next one, Lyrebird, at 67. (My next bestseller? Fingers crossed.)

For a long time, I was a bit sheepish about my late start, as if I had wasted the decades that had no books to show for them (I was always writing something, they were just unpublishable). I don’t feel like that now. I’m with Fonda, blooming late is fine. It’s better than fine. I can’t speak for movie stardom, which I suspect still favours the young and the dewy, but coming late to writing has been a blessing.

First and foremost, it doesn’t matter what a writer looks like. Being beautiful or butt ugly makes no difference when you pound a keyboard, and there is something liberating about never having been hired for your looks. Not to mention how much money, time and pain you save in botox, facelifts and erstwhile nips and tucks. There’s no age limit to writing (or painting, or ceramics, or photography, or playing the piano). No point at which you’re past it, unless your brain goes, and I guess that’s just the chance all of us take as we embark on the great adventure of ageing. But as long as my grey cells hold out, I can keep practising my profession. Whether anyone wants to read what I write is just the chance I take every time I put finger to keyboard, however withered that digit may be.

A long life, and I am about to turn 68, means so much living to fall back on – so many memories, stories, experiences and lessons – it’s like an inspiration cushion. Many writers I admire plan their novels meticulously, especially if, like me, they write crime fiction. To my editor’s eternal despair, I am a pantser, not a planner. Indeed, the only book I did plan is the only one that has been rejected by the publisher. Lesson learnt. Instead, I begin with an idea and a sketchy outline of what is going to happen. Then I rest heavily on my inspiration cushion and let my mind wander. My characters spring onto the page as if of their own volition, complete with their names. When I have had to change a character’s name, and I have, most recently because I’d stupidly called them the same name as a character in a smash hit movie, I find it very difficult. Like real people, the name is part of them, and they are part of their name. I sometimes have to apologise profusely to friends whose first name arrived as that of the murderer or some other not-very-nice character.

Apart from stealing people’s names, I don’t generally put actual events into my books. Experiences get filtered through my imagination and emerge very differently. I hope I am the only person who can guess what originally inspired them. Where being alive on this planet for almost seven decades really helps is in having experienced – and therefore understand – what it is to struggle with relationships; from birthing and raising children, to watching those same children birth and raise theirs. Observing friends living their lives, for better or worse, and reacting to the moments that we all have – when something completely unexpected happens. Layers and layers of life inside my head like some kind of archeological dig, there to be dug up when needed.

There are other writers who have come to their muse late, mostly women, due to much of our previous years being eaten away with youthful insecurity, a hostile wider world, childbearing and the intense exhaustion of being life-support systems for other human beings. Older crime writers such as Stella Rimington and PD James come to mind. The doyen of crime, Agatha Christie, started early but she kept on going. I am glad I’m a late bloomer. It turned out I needed all that failure, all that nipping in the bud, all those wrong turns. All grist to my eventual mill.

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