Old Love Genre Rule #1: Larry’s Rule
Old Love
Old people like me need old-people stories.
In other words, we need a genre of our own. I propose calling it Old Love.
Rule #1 of the Old Love genre is: Create an old person as a character and let her or him tell a personal story. I enlisted Larry, though he didn’t know it.
It started with Larry
For a while we lived in a house among the islands of Puget Sound on a suburban cul-de-sac. Next door renters came and went, and then one day came Larry. With his vehicles: an RV, an old red Ford 150, a pickup, and a car. Also some boats.
It seemed to me from a distance that Larry was old, and up close there was no doubt about it.
He was also tall and lean, healthy-looking, active. His hair was pure white, and his eyes shockingly blue.
And he came alone.
So the instant question was, what was he doing there? Had some transition just happened in his life, a divorce, a death in the family, bankruptcy?
Also, what did he do with all those vehicles? One answer: He came and went. In the pickup, in the RV, in the car. Sometimes he and his RV were gone for a week or more.
The birth of a character
Where to, I had to wonder? With whom? Doing what?
And so one of the two main characters of a new series was born. Or actually two were born. It takes two to tango.
One, Larry. Not named Larry, of course. And the other, the woman who lived next door, who wondered these things about her new neighbor.
Wondering inside her head, because that’s where she lived, not only because she had been a widow these past three years, but because her marriage hadn’t been that great so she’d been living inside her head for a long time.
I’m talking here about the fictional woman next door, not the actual one, me, who happened to have the same questions.
Those three questions, where he went, with whom, to do what, never went away, and she’d stand at the window watching him leave, and ponder them.
Larry became Martin, and in his fictional incarnation, he and the fictional wondering woman next door did get to know each other. That’s where the Old Love genre came from.
Old Love, the genre
Old Love requires old people. These two were ‘older’, as we say these days. She is 65, he is 78. He seems to like her. A lot.
For example, he is always inviting himself over to spend the night.
FWIW, she is always saying no.
Not because she’s old, but because she’s not that kind of girl, and never was. As she explains to herself.
Because after she tells him no, he drives off in the RV and is gone for a good while and she wonders if he’ll ever stop by with his pot of hot homemade soup again and keep being her friend.
Because now she realizes she’s been lonely. For a long time.
What genre is that?
When I published this Old Love story, someone asked me what its genre was. And I couldn’t find one that fit. Women’s fiction, yes, a saga, yes, but something else too.
Not a romance. It breaks some of the fundamental rules of romance.
Old Love has rules, too. We’ll stipulate here at the start of this conversation that at least one character has to be over 65. Why? Because we who are over 65 need those stories about our special time of life. Plus with much life lived, we are complex. We have many layers. Simple answers won’t do.
Simple answers such as living happily ever after. At 65 you’d better start living now.
Depth and complexity are important in the Old Love genre. Larry was not like any other old guy, best guess based on my experience, a bit with him and a lot with senior-life. And that guess stimulated a whole series.
I did talk to him, to the real Larry. Maybe only once. But it turned out he was a bit deaf and he was also under his truck. That real conversation was awkward, but it did turn into a scene in the first Maggie book.
Your Old Love Story
If you’re over 65 I’d like to hear your Old Love story, real or fiction. And if you want to join me in writing about Old Love, one way is to keep track in your notebook about the old people you run across, because they’re not all just bent and gray.
They may in fact be bent and gray, but there’s more. That’s the good part.
We moved away a few years after we met Larry, and so did he. I never got answers to the questions I had about him and his vehicles and his life — except in my stories where he’s an important character.
Writing novels means getting to know people, and writing about Old Love is an exercise in complexity, built on layers of experience. Want to try it?
You can read about Martin, his neighbor Maggie, and their time together in the islands of the Pacific Northwest in the Always Maggie series, on Amazon. Or start with a free bonus chapter, Sandbagging; you will be asked to join my email list and receive tidbits from my writing from time to time, and also some snippets of the insightful, also humorous, science fiction of my dear old love, Dr. John S. Lewis, planetary chemist and author of Mining the Sky and more.
Peg Lewis is a great-grandmother, linguist, and life-long writer and scientist. She was born in New England. She also lived in San Diego, Spain, Switzerland, Beijing, New Zealand, and the Pacific Northwest. She currently resides in Tucson in a 3-generation household where she is next-to-oldest.
Peg believes in Old Love, a rich genre not to be confused with young romance. Old Love is about relationships, deep, enduring, and complicated. She knows: she has been married to space scientist and author John S Lewis for 57 years, and if she is old, he is yet older.
