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?