Too young to write?
A 15-year-old girl in Tennessee recently published a suspense book with Tate Publishing (not a vanity press but the website says there is a small author investment in production, so it’s not exactly fully the NY-model either). But whatever the publisher, I’m still inclined to see this as an achievement, though it does get me wondering: Does age matter when it comes to writing/publishing? I know that, personally, at age 15, I was a better writer than most of my classmates, but in the grand scheme of writers worldwide, I was still pretty bad. Heck, sometimes even reading things I wrote three or four years ago makes me hurt inside, but I think this has less to do with age than with experience. So I went searching for what other people think, and it looks like the general answer (at least in the blogs I frequent) is that, no, age doesn’t matter.
Here are some other people that accomplished big things at a young age:
- Christopher Paolini wrote the first book of the best-selling Inheritance Cycle at age 15 and was on the best seller list by age 19
- Mozart began composing at age 5
- Jackie Cooper was nominated for Best Actor at age 9
- Kieron Williamson sold out his second exhibit in 14 minutes and sold 16 of his paintings for over £18,000, at the age of 7
- Michael Kearney received a bachelor’s in archaeology at age 10 and went on to teach college at age 17
- Abdul Aleem Siddique memorized the entire Qur’an at age 4
Anyone else feeling like a failure yet?
Tags: age, publishing, writing
S.E. Hinton published The Outsiders when she was 19, but Charles Baxter didn’t publish his first novel until he was 40. (He was something like 37 when his first short story collection came out.) It doesn’t matter when the greatness comes out. If it’s in there, it will come out. Age doesn’t mean much to me. It’s really about doing something with what you’ve got.
An article that might interest you, from the New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell
What a great article, Laura. Thanks!
I think one of the reasons my friend suggested I read Richard Bausch is because he had his first stories published when he was a complete adult (40′s maybe? Maybe 30′s). I like to hear about the late bloomers.
I was in a used bookstore last week and discovered that John Kennedy Toole (Confederacy of Dunces) wrote a novel when he was 16 called “The Neon Bible.” The NYT Michiko Kakutani called it “…a remarkable achievement.” I haven’t read it yet, but I look forward to reading it.
[...] of another part of Smith’s prejudice: that age is somehow a testament to skill. We’ve discussed that before. But Smith says the following: Young agents don’t know contracts and how to negotiate a contract [...]