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I was 45 when I had my first fiction published and I’ve published at least one story a year since then (although there have been years that it’s felt like I just barely met that goal). I think my MFA thesis advisor assigned Fitzgerald to me as a role model of a late-in-life writer (it’s amusing to think of my then-45-year-old self as “old” a decade later). But like Fitzgerald, it’s not like I wasn’t writing before. I’ve written my whole life and while I took multiple extended breaks from sending things out and I have notebooks full of unfinished stories, I still wrote and after really pushing myself back into writing (and more importantly, finishing) when I was coming up on 40 years old and subsequently pursuing an MFA to further polish my craft, I managed to get that first bit of external validation in the form of a published story (one which was paid, and in print). The seeking of validation is a bit brutal and soul-crushing (at best I’ve gotten 1 acceptance for 25 rejections, overall it’s more like 49 rejections for each acceptance), but as W. P. Kinsella said, it’s not the publishing that makes a writer, but the writing.
And a bit more apropos of the article, I’d add that to a large extent, I think that the 45 years of life leading up to my first publication were a big part of what made me able to write something worth publishing.
> I think that the 45 years of life leading up to my first publication were a big part of what made me able to write something worth publishing.
"Before you can write the book, you have to be the book."
The greatest concentration of interesting folks are the elderly on the fringes of society. If a writer ever wanted to find an ideal biography subject if they weren't the book, there is a demographic of sane, elderly, rough sleepers on each coast of America who have experienced more than the average person can possibly imagine.
The lead actor of Charlie's Country has an extensive biography that goes broader and deeper than many might expect. Just the Dennis Hopper stories alone make a tale worth telling.
Nice. I think I've heard of that title.
I've met a few gems amongst a cavalcade of colorful characters who perhaps could be captured fairly between pen and paper to record an echo of human splendor that should live beyond time.
- A paranoid but happy and cynical gentleman with long, scraggly hair like a wizard from the Appalachias who was a military aircraft electrician and an Apple rework tech. Stories spanning every feeling with hilarious exaggerations for emphasis.
- A former writer at big name NY newspaper, ex-hippie, and crab fisherman who had quite the life of drugs, women, and was part of it. Body might be shot, but a mind sharper than people who are 30 now without hyperbole. Knows where, when, and who of the cool spots of then and now.
- You'd swear he was dangerous or black Santa Claus. Nope, sweetest and coolest guy in the world. Picking cotton, keeping out of trouble during times that were turbulent, elevator repair, and teaching.
It's a great little film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRJpcc5kDTg
Have to check that out. Good find!
Darn, one less backup career for me
What's interesting about PF, of course, is that she just didn't do very much writing earlier on. Glad to hear you have made some progress!
But she did. From the article:
> The other answer given is that she wasn’t, in fact, such a late starter. Critics point to her childhood stories, anonymous reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, her probable contributions to Desmond’s history of the Irish Guards, and the literary magazine she and Desmond ran together when the children were little. There were also four short stories she wrote earlier in life: two as a young child, two in the 1950s when she was a mother. (Fitzgerald wrote very few short stories overall.)
I would guess that were I to die today, there would be very little evidence that I wrote anything before 2014.
I wouldn’t consider that much writing over 30 years (from 15 to 45 yo). Fiction as just 4 short stories, being 2 as a child.
I’d would say that’s very little writing before your first novel.
What did you do before fiction? Is it worth it monetarily? or did you have to change a lot of things to pursue the dream?
We need to normalize “late-blooming”.
Not everyone needs to achieve success (whatever that means) before their thirties. It seems like the spotlight will always be on the young blood revolutionizing a particular sector.
Most entrepreneurs don’t reach success, or even launch businesses, before being well into their thirties and forties.
The article indicates that she likely ghostwrote a piece published under her husband's name during the period when many feel she "wasn't writing." I am reminded of the plot for the biopic Collette about a French writer whose initial success was from works published under her husband's name.
In the biopic Out of Africa, Karen Blixen is portrayed as learning to tell stories orally to her nieces and later her guests. The man who later becomes her lover gifts her a pen and tells her both "we pay our storytellers here" and "write them down sometime."
Blixen was a socialite who was able to access family money by marrying her "lover's brother." When they divorced, she was sterile from syphilis contracted from her unfaithful husband who slept around casually and probably couldn't use marriage and family inheritance a second time as a means to support herself.
She also published some of her works under a male name. And I read a piece called Homme de Plume on Jezebel that told the story of a woman writer submitting her work to publishers under a male name and getting much more positive feedback for the exact same manuscript.
So gender discrimination is certainly real, but I'm a woman and I don't see getting a sex change operation to fix my issues. Some women downplay their gender by using initials, like JK Rowling.
But the thing that interests me is the pieces I might control in some way on my end. Both Penelope Fitzgerald and Karen Blixen appear to have had no ambition initially. They both appear to have been content to try to make life work financially by being wives, the role society expected of them, and it seems likely they only sought to develop a career as paid writers when it became clear they couldn't make life work via that means.
I think women get generally inculcated from birth with the idea that a "successful" woman living The Good Life is a woman who married well and had kids and put her husband's career and children's welfare first. Career women tend to get vilified as bad mothers and seem to divorce frequently, possibly because if a woman has sufficient income she doesn't need to try to make a bad marriage work.
So I think women tend to lack mental models men seem to be inculcated with and this seems to be a separate issue from the much more readily recognized issue of gender discrimination.
No clue how to fix it. It doesn't seem to be part of the public discourse and seems unlikely to ever become so.
I think it is part of the public discourse, you just may not have encountered it. I recently had cause to recommend some examples of science fiction books that had good world-building that would be useful models for another writer. The two that sprang to mind that I gave the writer, it turned out, were both by female writers (although another non-fiction book I suggested was by a male writer). Part of my onboarding training at my current job was about avoiding unconscious biases by being aware of them.
It does feel a little counter-intuitive that women get discriminated against in publishing given that I think the majority of workers in publishing are women (although the gender balance is reversed as you move up the ladder). I’m querying a novel right now and 85% of the agents on my query list are women. Of course, ultimately what matters is the views of the people writing the checks.
This is what I think is not really being talked about:
So I think women tend to lack mental models men seem to be inculcated with and this seems to be a separate issue from the much more readily recognized issue of gender discrimination.
And you don't talk about it either. You talk about things like subconscious bias in other people.
Bias in other people gets talked about a great deal. It certainly is a real issue but I don't think it fully explains the issue and I think bias and stereotypes have some basis in reality, which people don't like hearing.
Most people "bet the odds" when interacting socially. If bosses tend to be white males, white males get assumed to be the boss instead of the woman or person of color who really is in charge.
It makes "minorities" -- i.e. the people subjected to bias -- really crazy but lots of people actively justify navigating the world this way as the convenient and logical answer and feel that "only an idiot" would waste their time on checking if this is the 10 or 20 percent of the time or whatever that it's not true.
The thing we don't discuss is the degree to which women get effectively brainwashed and trained from birth to assume her man's career comes first, she will do the cooking and cleaning, etc.
It's so invisible you are telling me "it gets discussed" and not noticing that what you think I'm talking about isn't my point at all.
Real world bias exists which actively discriminates against women in all kinds of careers. But there is a more insidious force which convinces women to think and act in ways which undermine their careers and we tend to be older before we have put some of that behind us.
Interesting insight. If I understand correctly, the core of your point was, “I think women tend to lack mental models men seem to be inculcated with” and now I’m wondering what I can do to help my daughter avoid this.
If you are the dad, spend time with her. Everything I have read suggests "daddy's girls" do better career wise.
Holds true in my family. My sister was "daddy's girl" and ended up with a serious career. I didn't get the same attention because he was in Vietnam when I was little and I never felt close to him. I always felt like he loved her, not me.
It wasn't true. That's just unfortunate happenstance, but my sister got something I didn't.
Our educational achievements in high school were extremely similar, including winning the same spiffy scholarship to the same spiffy college.
She got a real career. I was a homemaker for two decades.
A quick Google search indicates that 51% of the writers in the US are women. There is no discrimination there.
It’s not merely getting to publication, but also things like reviews, promotion, etc. The VIDA count project (which appears to have disappeared from the web) revealed the rather stunning imbalance on this front, which has been improved thanks to the illumination, but there continues to be discrimination in how books are received (one example often given is that Jonathan Franzen’s subject matter, written by a woman, is dismissed as merely “domestic” fiction rather than serious literature).
Not in numbers of writers that are women, at least. There can be plenty of other ways discrimination plays out.
> So I think women tend to lack mental models men seem to be inculcated with and this seems to be a separate issue from the much more readily recognized issue of gender discrimination.
This is discussed in queer spaces quite a bit. It is my belief that these mental models, as you call them, have a lot to do with how people are treated in their daily lives. Subtleties of language (down to body language) reveal the assumptions that people make about us. Try as we might, it seems impossible to avoid integrating such messaging into our self-image.
But this is not a space where I would go into detail on such topics.
Penelope Fitzgerald is a great writer. I've read The Blue Flower, Offshore and The Bookshop. The first two are superb. The Blue Flower is set in Jena in the 18th century - a place which was as culturally influential as Palo Alto today. It goes well with Magnificent Rebels, the fun gossipy history of the German romantics who hung out there.
I published my first book last year at 60 years old. It was kind of nice working on carbon-nanotube 2048 bit computer systems and flying saucers for a while before I got back to 8-bit micro-controllers and C.