Shari Caudron alerted me to this Malcolm Gladwell essay, "Late Bloomer," in the current New Yorker. (Our subscription is behind enough that I'm just now reading the politics issue. Behind the times, as always.)
Here's the nut of it:
Ben Fountain’s rise sounds like a familiar story: the young man from the provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm. But Ben Fountain’s success was far from sudden. He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His breakthrough with “Brief Encounters” came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The “young” writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight.
God bless him, she said agnostically. (I've still got a decade, but unfortunately not a job as a lawyer...) Now, none of my 20-something short story writers should slack off when/if they read this, but the rest of us should not use our late bloominess as an excuse to not go for it... or should we? Gary, care to take this on?
