He had a serious case of writers’ block. For the past dozen years, Sting, aka Gordon Sumner, lost his creative mojo.
“I had no interest in tailoring songs for Top 40 radio, for 14-year-old girls or boys. I’m a 62-year-old man. Where is the arena to present my work?” he asked in an interview with Time Magazine (June 30, 2014).
This talented boomer was facing a challenge so many of us are going through right now. What had seemed relevant, interesting, or motivating in years past does not capture us now. Have we become jaded or less easily moved?
Actually, I think it’s neither. Per Barbara Strauch, who wrote The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain,
As we age, our emotions not only remain largely intact but are also considerably more robust than our abilities in other areas…”
So, what was Sting’s problem? I think I know.
We’ve been taught, raised, brainwashed, had it shoved down our throats that old age is irrelevant. It’s boring, stupid, a wasteland. Once you’re old, and you’ve moved out of interesting, vibrant, relevant youth, there’s nothing much else left to discover about humankind. We might as well shoot ourselves, we’re so pointless.
However, Sting, creative genius that he is, ignored the cultural mandate to disappear. Instead, he found another gear. He wrote a Broadway musical based on his birthplace of Wallsend, a port town in northeastern England. Entitled The Last Ship, it’s the story of a “self-exiled” man who returns home and finds his community about to vanish. They will build one last ship to show the world what they do and who they are.
Engaged in the project, his writers’ block vanished. Sting says 40-50 songs “just poured out of me fully formed.”
I think this is what he discovered: the new relevance of age. Sting found a whole new creative place from which to mine his art, and – good for marketing – a gigantic audience of passionately curious older minds that are fully equipped with deep emotional capacity.
When I published my novel, Dakota Blues, I anticipated that there would be a market for midlife art, because there’s so much material in the second half of life. My God, the things we go through, and the way we react and adapt, are so interesting. Not that the kids don’t have their own fascinating developments, but everybody’s writing about them. I’m only suggesting we older peeps shift our focus. Let’s dig down and find out what’s going on with our age group. Here are some of the issues that engage me:
- How are you different from when you were younger, and is that a good or a bad thing?
- What would you still like to learn?
- What ass-kicking talent or strength have you finally mastered?
- Is there anything you’ve given up on achieving? What made you decide that, and are you okay with it?
- Have you discovered anything about your life that you were doing wrong for, oh, say the last 30 years, and now that you know, you’ve decided to change it?
When Sting began to look back on his life and his aging hometown, he found a wealth of material that galvanized him. By all accounts, he’s electrifying audiences again. I would theorize that there’s an untapped well in the experiences of the second half. For artists, this is exciting news. For audiences, you may soon be entertained at a whole new level.
Open your minds, folks. Find another gear.
Good post, I am finding that old is the best time to write. I am also discovering that engaging angst is working wonders. Only the shadow knows has more relevance than I once thought.
Bob, we’ve got so much more life under our belt, so many more observations and so much drama from which to construct our stories. Endlessly interesting, I think.
So if Sting can do it, so can we. Once again, your post inspires me to look at ways to reinvent myself. Like so many others, I feel like I am at a crossroads waiting to see which direction to turn.