WriteOn! Ageing in Your World

One of the defining characteristics of a society is its attitude toward ageing and the elderly.  Some cultures revere their elders and seek their knowledge to guide the group.  Others coddle their elderly like children but do not really take them seriously.  Some have such a horror of old age and death that they make their old folk nearly invisible.  And a few, historically, have sacrificed the old to preserve resources for the young.

The societies you write about and the characters that navigate them will be affected by these attitudes (or any variations you come up with).  Ageing might be a challenge in itself for one of your characters, as physical abilities fade. And how the individual characters react to elderly secondary characters may be revealing too. One of the funnier and more touching stories I have read in the Sword and Sorceress series dealt with an aging female warrior who finds that the dragon she is to fight is also getting on in years and equally tired of the whole charade.

Challenge: write a scene in which your character either interacts with an elderly person [or other being] or has to deal with the consequences of their own ageing.

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