{"id":1288,"date":"2016-11-11T06:00:16","date_gmt":"2016-11-11T14:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=1288"},"modified":"2016-11-09T09:34:02","modified_gmt":"2016-11-09T17:34:02","slug":"its-never-too-late","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2016\/11\/11\/its-never-too-late\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s Never Too Late"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week I heard from a female reader who, like me, was discouraged from taking a creative writing class in college.\u00a0 The e-mail went something like this.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m sixty-two years old and I\u2019ve always wanted to be a writer. Is it too late for me?\u201d<\/p>\n

My initial reaction\u2014a bad one\u2014was to wonder, “Too late for what?\u201d\u00a0 Too late to start writing?\u00a0 Let\u2019s see, your fingers obviously still work as do both your brain and your computer.\u00a0 If you want to write, what\u2019s stopping you?\u00a0 Write for Pete\u2019s sake!\u00a0 Start now.\u00a0 How old will you be if you don\u2019t start writing?<\/p>\n

The thing is, at age 62 she\u2019s probably learned one or two things along the way, important details of living that a newly graduated twenty-something MFA won\u2019t learn for say \u2026 well \u2026 some forty years or so.\u00a0 If you have something you want to say, say it. Put it down in words.\u00a0 Let your kids read it and your friends and your grandkids.\u00a0 What you\u2019ve written doesn\u2019t have to be War and Peace to be interesting or meaningful to somebody else.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

The \u201ctoo late\u201d part of the equation probably has less to do with the actual writing than it does with possible outcomes, as in:\u00a0 \u201cIs it too late for me to become a best-selling author?\u201d The truth is, for some of those shiny, fresh-off-the-factory-floor MFAs out there, it\u2019s probably both too early and too late because they\u2019re never going to make it big. Or even small because most writers don\u2019t. 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\u2019re making WAY less than minimum wage but they\u2019re doing it anyway for the love of writing.<\/p>\n

So if this lady is hopes writing will be\u00a0a way of augmenting her social security, it probably isn\u2019t going to happen, although it could.\u00a0 Lightening could strike for her the same way it did for Helen Hooven Santmyer (here’s the Wikipedia Page<\/a>) whose charming first novel, And Ladies of the Club, was published and became a mega hit bestseller when the author was in her eighties.\u00a0 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!<\/p>\n

But it wouldn\u2019t have happened for her and won’t for my 62 year old correspondent if she doesn\u2019t put her butt in a chair, her fingers on a keyboard, and go to work.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019m really trying to say here, is this.\u00a0 If you want to write, what\u2019s stopping you?\u00a0 Don\u2019t look at the date on your driver\u2019s license and decide you\u2019re too old to start. Write what you want to write. Write what you like to read. Say what you want to say and don\u2019t even think about getting published. Think about learning to say what you want to say by using words on the page.<\/p>\n

Once you do that, you may not be a PUBLISHED writer, but if you’re writing, you are a writer.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Nowhere in that statement do I see any fine print that says that if you\u2019re over thirty-five or fifty-five or seventy-five, that you\u2019re out of luck and shouldn\u2019t even bother.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 He sent me a list of some of his favorite sayings.\u00a0 One really spoke to me:\u00a0 Success is found in cans; failure comes in can\u2019ts.<\/p>\n

Amen, brother.\u00a0 Preach on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week I heard from a female reader who, like me, was discouraged from taking a creative writing class in college.\u00a0 The e-mail went something like this.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m sixty-two years old and I\u2019ve always wanted to be a writer. Is it too late for me?\u201d My initial reaction\u2014a bad one\u2014was to wonder, “Too late for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-kM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1288"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1292,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288\/revisions\/1292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}