Of course any age at which you feel driven to write is the right age, but sometimes people who didn’t start to write when they were young wonder whether it’s too late. It’s not, and it can even be an advantage. Writing in Miss Conduct’s blog, Robin Abrahams said this:
“I'm 40, and only now can I begin to say that writing is my career. (I don't make my entire living off the Miss Conduct enterprise--I also work part-time as a researcher at Harvard Business School, but that's mostly writing, too, and usually about stuff I'm interested in, so I say it counts.) Sometimes I get a little anxious about that, wishing I'd got started sooner, worrying about my career trajectory. Forty is young but it's not young enough to be the Bright Young Thing anymore--at 40 you can't exactly be considered "precocious" for anything other than a Presidential run or menopause.
But all that stuff I did before I became Miss Conduct in 2005--the theater, the comedy, the graduate school, the bureaucracy, the freelancing, the catering, the housecleaning, the stuff I don't talk about unless I've had a martini or two--I wouldn't be the writer I am without those things.”
So if you’re past the ‘bright young thing’ category, don’t be afraid to start, because you’ve been building up a lot of great raw material.
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