If you’re a retired senior who needs fulfillment, consider writing a book.
Since we moved to El Dorado Hills my wife Tish, who has experience working with seniors, is seeking to work with retirees here in Folsom and El Dorado County. To help them find “purpose and passion” in life as she puts it.
This got me to thinking about the merits of becoming an author for the first time. For a person who is a senior, retired, and who perhaps is finding life to be a little bit on the short side of what it once was.
Sometimes when a person retires there’s a void. Perhaps the job that you have worked at for 35 years, a career—–and now it’s gone. What do you do with yourself? You can visit relatives. You can travel.
You can become a hobbyist or a busybody trying to fill in the time. But perhaps something is still lacking…the excitement of a challenge.
These things can’t take the place of the feeling of purpose that a job can give.
Book authorship can give you a second chance at a new career of sorts. Even if you don’t make a lot of money, your name on the cover of a book will be an exhibited body of work (on the internet) that even your old job could not offer you.
Book writing is not a hobby. It’s a craft particularly if it’s done well.
There are several advantages to becoming an author and you can self-publish if no publishing company acquires your work. I will talk about self-publishing in a later installment.
Your work, your story, will still be available to be read long after you and I are gone.
You have a lifetime of experiences behind you. A book is the perfect venue to entertain or to interest readers. You might choose to write an autobiography or a novel loosely based on your life.
There is one ironclad rule here.
Do not assume that something you have experienced yourself will automatically be of interest to readers. The reader must come to identify with something or some character in your book.
For example, you write a (nonfiction) book about your difficulties with a covert narcissistic former husband. Other women with similar experiences identify with this and want to read your book. In the book you offer these women examples of how you surmounted the problem.
If your work is fiction you can come to live in the world you create and its characters, with each page you write (this after you have plotted your book first).
Writing can be done any time in the privacy and comfort of your home.
The advantages of writing a book are physical and mental.
Writing keeps the mind sharp (recalling events), keeps the mind strong working to build plot, characters and narrative, and exercises language skills (choosing the right words).
But the psychological benefits are just as profound.
Writing a book takes consistent effort day after day. If you were fortunate enough to have a former job that you liked and looked forward to doing….writing is no different.
I get up in the morning and fueled by coffee, I love to begin work on a book when my creative powers are at their peak. By two o’clock they begin to decline and so I knock off. It’s not eight to five like your former job was. An ongoing project gives you a daily goal and an incentive to achieve each morning.
If things are going well and you know they are, you become more excited to continue on to the finish. This restores the sense of productivity that your former job provided you.
You feel a sense of accomplishment and your self-esteem strengthens.
Here’s another ironclad rule.
Do not judge the worth of your work by the amount of money that it eventually gains or doesn’t. Some of the worst published crap makes money and some masterpieces very little. Money is not an indicator of quality.
If you’re in it just for the money, you’re better off playing the stock market.
Now let’s finish with its worth (authorship).
In my life I have had bad jobs that I hated and a few good ones. I didn’t publish my first book until I was 53 years old. This was a self-publish. My second book with a publishing company came when I was 66. Since then I have written 40 novels.
My former jobs are largely forgotten. They mean very little to me.
My book authorship, that means everything to me.
John Sammon is a freelance writer and the author of 41 books, many of which can be found on Amazon. He is a resident of El Dorado Hills. His commentary is part of a series on the trip of self publishing featured by Folsom Times.
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