So I had this thought percolating in my head all day and felt the urge to put it down here. When I first read The Fellowship of the Ring I was 13 years old and I fell into the tale of the Bagginses and The War of the Ring. Frodo was 33 and Bilbo was 111. Aragorn seemed ancient and Arwen even more so. And yet I had no problems identifying (and perhaps overidentifying) with them. On the other end of the Inklings spectrum we had CS Lewis though, where children lose sight of magic and can never revisit Narnia once they grow up, like Susan. Unless they’ve been magically brought over like the first High King and Queen of Narnia. I have other thoughts about Narnia (a book series I adore but still have major issues with) but that should be the subject of another post. And yet, there were many things about Narnia that was satisfying for the old soul, which is why until today, the readers for the Narnia books are of a wide age range (despite the infamy towards poor Susan).
Later on, as I read more and more works of epic fantasy, I noticed that older protagonists were not always the case. Of course with fantasy fiction that had a wide ensemble cast, you would have nuances and divergences in age groupings but the main protagonists tended to be young. They would sometimes be in their teens (and the overprotective auntie in me gasps at the things these youngsters get embroiled in) or in their twenties. And I get it. It’s fine to have younger protagonists because that’s often the gateway for younger readers or nerds. But not if that becomes the expected norm. Authors who have more mature protagonists are out there (the novels of Patricia McKillip which are most adored by me, for instance) but this is not a publishing norm right now in 2024.
I’ve observed as a reader, a writer and a literary academic that in the last two decades fantasy seems to skew even younger; many people assume that all fantasy is YA. When querying our projects to agents (as I once did) we have to very clearly specify Adult Fantasy or people will assume it is YA. I enjoy YA books like everyone else but they often have me asking, “So what about those of us who are older? Chopped Liver? Should we consider our lives over because we are not represented?”
(of course there are other axes of representation that I consider in Watermyth, for instance in terms of race, age and (dis)ability, but that’s for another post).
The funny thing about me is that I was an old lady even when I was young. I’ve always had an older outlook and even in my twenties I was writing about fortysomething and fiftysomething women because, “That’s where I’m going to wind up so I might as well write for women like me.”
So here I am, on the cusp of fifty and my first novel has an ensemble cast with main characters ranging in age from the mid-thirties to the fifties. Aila of course is in her fifties and various others are in that age group. I have the luxury of making this choice now as an indie not to have to skew my fiction towards a younger age group because I want to write stories for people like me, the middle-aged Gen X bookworm/nerd, the Boomer fantasy nerd, even the millennials hurtling towards their forties who perhaps were inducted into fantasy fiction via YA but who might want a different perspective as life/age-changes widens their outlook. Of course, since I’m still discovering middle-aged life as a perpetually bewildered nerd, a lot of the things I write are part of a learning curve for me. I don’t know for instance if I want to write pages about perimenopausal hell for some of my characters who likely go through those things or if I want those things to remain genteelly in the background. But that is something we shall discover in future volumes of Cantata of the Fourfold Realms.
I can’t say I’m writing only for older people, though. I think we (writers, the publishing industry) tend to underestimate the youth. I mean, entire generations have swooned over Aragorn and Arwen and rooted for those Bagginses, regardless of age group.
If you’d like to check out Watermyth, here’s the link to find out how to buy a copy or order it for your library.