Better Later than Never

2021-10-03T12:45:22-07:00October 15th, 2021|

Guest blog by Valerie Taylor

Here’s a fun fact and opinion: A 2010 study of “professionally published novelists found the average age of first publication to be 36 years. Given that many novels take many years to perfect, it stands to reason that late twenties, early thirties are prime time for putting in those writing hours.”*

Because I was nearly twice that age when I published my debut novel, What’s Not Said (She Writes Press, 2020), I was naturally curious and decided to do my own research.

First, I asked Google for a list of authors who published “later in life.” As you can imagine, there’s quite a list, including George Eliot (40), Isak Dineson (49), Tony Morrison (40), Joseph Heller (39), Anna Sewell (51), to name just a few. Obviously “later in life” is mostly thought to be 40s and 50s.

I moved onward, conducting unscientific interviews with nine contemporary authors who published their first award-winning books after age 60. Their personal stories and perspectives are below.

Besides the usual suspects—careers, raising children, single parenting—why did they wait until their 60s to publish their first books?

OJ Simpson’s infamous slow speed chase and its impact on a fictional family formed the premise of Mary Camarillo’s novel, The Lockhart Women (She Writes Press, 2021), which she published at age 69. She admits that it took her six years to write mostly because she didn’t take her work seriously until she attended her first writing conference. “I went with great expectations of finding an agent, fame, and fortune…and came home with a sense of purpose and discipline.”

As a magazine journalist, Dianne Ebertt Beeaff found writing historical fiction “demanded far more depth, research, and commitment than the shorter non-fiction pieces,” she was accustomed to. Perhaps that’s why it took until Dianne was 61 to publish Power’s Garden (Five Star Publications, 2009), the story of how two families and two women—one Texan, the other Mormon—developed an “embattled and gripping relationship” while living through a drought in Arizona’s Gila Valley during World War I.

When Linda Stewart Henley at age 69 was conducting research for an entirely different project in New Orleans, where she’d attended college years earlier, she discovered Edgar Degas had lived there nearly 150 years ago with his Creole cousin and sister-in-law. Intrigued, Linda brought art and life together in Estelle (She Writes Press, 2020), a novel with two storylines that create an intersection between a journal written by a friend of Degas’s and one of his paintings.

Rita Dragonette published The Fourteenth of September (She Writes Press, 2018) when she was 68, seventeen years after she began writing it. Originally she planned it as “a series of linked stories” about a young woman who’s tracing her path of “self-discovery” at the peak of the Vietnam War. A writing instructor encouraged her to write a book instead saying, “It’s your life, your material.”

Pandemic was on Kate Szegda’s mind long before we ever heard of Covid-19. Growing up, Kate was inspired by her mother’s stories about the family pharmacy, especially during the early 1900s. Hoping to publish by the 100th anniversary of the 1918 pandemic, Kate began writing her book at age 57. Pharmacy Girl: The Great War, Spanish Influenza, and the Truth About Billy Detwiler (Independently Published, KDP), was published in 2019. She’s now 73.

With age comes wisdom. So, what advice would they give or what would they have done differently?

Eileen Sanchez wishes she’d kept a journal over the years. If she had perhaps she would’ve written the memoir she’d intended to write when she retired at 63. Instead Eileen wrote Freedom Lessons — A Novel (She Writes Press, 2019), which fictionalizes her experiences as a teacher during the mandated school integration in the deep South. To “later in life” writers, she says: “Believe in yourself. If you don’t…why should anyone else?”

Esther Amini began writing her memoir CONCEALED (Greenpoint Press, 2020) in her mid 60s. It took her five years to complete, mainly because she “needed the right space and time to gain perspective” on all she’d experienced during 42 years in private practice as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Combine that with her memories of “growing up caught between two clashing cultures — American and Iranian,” Esther advises aspiring writers to “Fight your fears. The voices that say, ‘I can’t,’ lie.”

Three words rattled inside Judith Teitelman’s head for twenty years. After the death of an early love led her to a 1983 journal inscription with the same words, she knew the title, but not the substance, of the book she felt destined to write. Four years later, Judith immortalized the words in her novel Guesthouse for Ganesha (She Writes Press, 2019) in which Eastern beliefs and perspectives are interwoven with Western realities and pragmatism. Lesson? “Life will often take us in directions we can’t otherwise imagine but are exactly where we need to be.”

Sex, drugs, and the rock ‘n roll ‘60s are juxtaposed with the suburban life of the ‘80s in Deborah K. Shepherd’s novel So Happy Together (She Writes Press, 2021). Published when Deb was 74, this novel explores what happens when “the conundrum of love and sexual attraction, creativity and family responsibilities” are out of sync. To aspiring authors, she exclaims, “Just do it! Hopefully, you’re going to be in your 60’s, 70’s, 80’s anyway, so you might as well be an author in your 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, or even 90’s.”

Granted, the above stories provide merely a snapshot of the growing number of “later in life” authors publishing each year. And while I’m not suggesting it’s a trend, hybrid and self-publishing join the “traditional” path as viable options for writers of all ages. As such, when “life happens” to aspiring authors, they can be confident there really is a tomorrow, and the word “never” need not be spoken.

*First Novel Survey Results, Jim C. Hines, March 25, 2010. https://www.jimchines.com/2010/03/survey-results/

 

Valerie Taylor is the award-winning author of What’s Not Said (She Writes Press, 2020) and the sequel What’s Not True (She Writes Press, 2021). The third book in the What’s Not series will publish in 2023. Follow her at valerietaylorauthor.com, facebook.com/ValerieTaylorAuthor, and subscribe to Behind and Ahead, a newsletter dedicated to readers.

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3 Comments

  1. Cheryl October 15, 2021 at 5:55 pm - Reply

    Love this Valerie! So encouraging for those of us writing later in life. Thanks!

  2. Dragonette Rita October 24, 2021 at 8:19 am - Reply

    So many writers, so many reasons. Bottom line, nothing can or should hold you back for what you need to do. Thanks, Valerie.

  3. Carolyn Lee Arnold October 24, 2021 at 9:24 am - Reply

    Love️ the research you did, and how you normalize writing after 60! Thank you!

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