Good writing requires a certain level of life experience and worldly wisdom to be authentic. It's no wonder so many writers don't start writing, at least for publication, until later in life.
Charles Frazier, whose best-selling first novel, Cold Mountain, won the National Book Award in 1997, wrote:
"Like a lot of people, I tried to write some fiction when I was in my twenties -- college age, just after that. It didn't work out so well. I wasn't happy with what I did; it was sort of pretentious and technically pretty weak. So I put the idea away and decided that I was going to be an academic and that I would study other people's writing rather than write myself.
"But when I got to be forty, I started wanting to write again for some reason and found when I began doing it that what I was doing was very different from what I had done when I was twenty-five. I liked it better and was happier doing it, and it seemed to me to be worth doing suddenly. I think as you get older you get a sense of what is important in life and what is significant enough to write about."
Frazier was 47 when Cold Mountain was published.
Notice also that, by his own account, his early writing was product driven while the later was process driven. He talks about the results of the early writing (pretentious, technically weak), but of his mindset with his later writing (happier, worth doing).
A complete interview with Frazier is found at bookbrowse.com.
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Thanks for another interesting observation on the art of writing. There is a 40 minute video interview of Tom Wolfe that illustrates your points about background and the journey from product to process. Wolfe didn't start his first novel (Bonfire of the Vanities) until he was almost 50. You can access the five-part interview on nationalreview.com. It's in the Uncommon Knowledge archives, May 2008. Wolfe has come a long way from his gonzo journalism style, but I still enjoy rereading the early stuff.
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