Writing with perspective

I am sixty now. That means something. It means I now look at the world as a "senior" and not a boy, a young man, or even a man of middle age. And that's important because, for the past ten years, I have written novels from the perspective of (mostly) younger people.

Though my protagonists have ranged in age from twelve (Ashley Lane in The Lane Betrayal) to seventy-eight (Elizabeth Campbell in Mercer Street), most have fallen neatly in the eighteen-to-thirty range.

In my next series, a family saga, I will do something different. I will write a story from the viewpoint of three siblings who are old in mind, if not in body or spirit. I will incorporate the perspective of age.

Bill Carpenter, the oldest sibling, is eighty-one at the start of The Fountain, the first book in the Second Chance series. Paul, his brother, is seventy-five. Annie, their sister, is seventy-two.

The Carpenters don't stay that way, of course. After jumping into a fountain of youth, they emerge in 1905 as young adults. They begin new lives as younger, wiser versions of the people they used to be.

The siblings will retain their "old" minds even as they progress through the rest of the three-book series. They will remember the lessons of their old lives and try to apply them in their new ones.

That's where my age may come in handy. For the first time in a long time, I will be able to write from the perspective of a person who has experienced much of what my characters have experienced. I will be able to write with a little more authority and authenticity.

Throughout The Fountain, I will refer to the 1960s and 1970s, decades I remember, times when my characters came of age and faced life-changing events. I will provide a framework for a story.

I am about forty percent into the first draft of The Fountain, which is set primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1905 and 1906. I expect to publish the novel, my twenty-first overall, in September.