This week I heard from a female reader who, like me, was discouraged from taking a creative writing class in college.  The e-mail went something like this.  “I’m sixty-two years old and I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Is it too late for me?”

My initial reaction—a bad one—was to wonder, “Too late for what?”  Too late to start writing?  Let’s see, your fingers obviously still work as do both your brain and your computer.  If you want to write, what’s stopping you?  Write for Pete’s sake!  Start now.  How old will you be if you don’t start writing?

The thing is, at age 62 she’s probably learned one or two things along the way, important details of living that a newly graduated twenty-something MFA won’t learn for say … well … some forty years or so.  If you have something you want to say, say it. Put it down in words.  Let your kids read it and your friends and your grandkids.  What you’ve written doesn’t have to be War and Peace to be interesting or meaningful to somebody else.  What you really need to have is something to say and/or share, and it needs to be put down in black and white for all to see.

The “too late” part of the equation probably has less to do with the actual writing than it does with possible outcomes, as in:  “Is it too late for me to become a best-selling author?” The truth is, for some of those shiny, fresh-off-the-factory-floor MFAs out there, it’s probably both too early and too late because they’re never going to make it big. Or even small because most writers don’t. Most of the people who call themselves writers earn less than $5000 a year from writing. By the way, if you do the math, that means they’re making WAY less than minimum wage but they’re doing it anyway for the love of writing.

So if this lady is hopes writing will be a way of augmenting her social security, it probably isn’t going to happen, although it could.  Lightening could strike for her the same way it did for Helen Hooven Santmyer (here’s the Wikipedia Page) whose charming first novel, And Ladies of the Club, was published and became a mega hit bestseller when the author was in her eighties.  It was her first published book. I read it in the early nineties when I came down with pneumonia and had to stay in bed for a couple of days! I loved the book so much that I barely minded having pneumonia!

But it wouldn’t have happened for her and won’t for my 62 year old correspondent if she doesn’t put her butt in a chair, her fingers on a keyboard, and go to work.

What I’m really trying to say here, is this.  If you want to write, what’s stopping you?  Don’t look at the date on your driver’s license and decide you’re too old to start. Write what you want to write. Write what you like to read. Say what you want to say and don’t even think about getting published. Think about learning to say what you want to say by using words on the page.

Once you do that, you may not be a PUBLISHED writer, but if you’re writing, you are a writer.

When I bought my first computer in 1983, David Graham, the guy who sold it to me, fixed it so that when I booted up in the morning, these are the words that flashed across the screen: A WRITER IS SOMEONE WHO HAS WRITTEN TODAY.

Nowhere in that statement do I see any fine print that says that if you’re over thirty-five or fifty-five or seventy-five, that you’re out of luck and shouldn’t even bother.

Someone else sent me an e-mail this week, a relatively new fan who is reading my books which he downloads from his local library in the city of York in the UK.  He sent me a list of some of his favorite sayings.  One really spoke to me:  Success is found in cans; failure comes in can’ts.

Amen, brother.  Preach on.