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Countdown to NaNoWriMo: 5 days


First off, apologies for being unable to do basic subtraction.  I hope I didn't induce panic in to many people.  You had an extra day! Yay.... Back to business.

One of the big stories for those who follow Giants baseball (or post-season baseball) is that 36 year old (he turns 37 in 4 days).  Marco Scutaro is made his World Series debut two days ago.  And was the NLCS MVP after batting .500 for the series.   He made his major league debut only ten years ago at age 26, which in baseball years is "late."  So, it got me thinking about literary Late Bloomers.

I would devote a whole long post to so called Late Bloomers, had I the time today.  I've spent a significant percentage of my professional career working with children under the age of 5.  The world of Early Childhood Education becomes a bit myopic, as it should be in ways.  My mother, a career educator, always said she wanted 'regular' kids, who showed promise but had to learn to work a bit harder to succeed.  They learn to work hard, she says,  to not give up.  We worry about signs of achievement so early when life is a marathon of learning. 

Late Bloomers are simply the people that, as Sir Ken Robinson puts it, had to recover from their education.  For whatever reason, our system and style of education has not "failed" us, but treated us like a suit off the rack.  You could spend $10,000 on a proper suit but unless it's tailored, it will be an almost fit, restrictive or baggy in places that matter.

What is "late blooming" really?  Late by time tables set by societal standards?  Blooming?  Again, I say recovery.  If not for the expectations of family and culture, we might come into our own earlier, but I am getting into whiny territory here where I excuse my financial distress in the name of creative freedom.  I figure that people considered "late bloomers" never minded the misnomer anyway.  I have always been late: out exploring, taking the scenic route, gathering scraps of memory and adventure here and there to bottle and bleed back onto the page.

Here's a great article about Late Bloomers in The New Yorker, written by Malcom Gladwell, bien sur.

5 "Late Blooming" Authors

1. Laura Ingalls Wilder: Inspired by her daughters literary success, Wilder set out to write books about her childhood.  Little House in the Big Woods was published and Laura Ingalls Wilder began her career as a published author at age 65.
2. William S. Burroughs: Though he had been writing for years at the behest of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs claims the death of his second wife (he killed her in a game of William Tell) is what finally motivated him to become a writer.  Semi-autobiographical, Junkie was first published in 1953 under a pseudonym, Burroughs was 39.
3. Lois Lowry: Lowry began her professional career as a freelance journalist, but was encouraged to write children's books by publishing house Houghton Mifflin.  A Summer to Die was published in 1977 when Lowry was 40.
4. Raymond Chandler:  Chandler held several jobs before publishing his debut novel The Big Sleep.  After the publication of a few pulp shorts in his late forties, Chandler found commercial success at age 51 through Detective Philip Marlowe.
5. Eric Carle: As a graphic designer for The New York Times, Carle caught the eye of Billy Martin Jr. and together they produced the children's classic Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? in 1967.  Two years later, Carle wrote and illustrated a little book called The Very Hungry Caterpillar when he was 40 years old.

I feel the need for an addendum:  There is no doubt in my mind, that these ages of publication reflect little more than their life circumstances.  Had they a generous benefactor at age 18 or grown up in a connected family like The Alcotts, perhaps their bend toward success might have been less gradual.  Had they not found professional success in alternate careers, they would have been living and breathing fiction.  But were they not writers in their twenties, thirties, forties, even as the presses rejected their works or they found themselves bound to different professional paths?

They were always writers.   Maybe not authors, but writers always.  There is no regret in late, but never.  Maybe tomorrow will be the greatest novels never written. 

For more, here's a list of 41 Novelists Debuting Over the Age of 40, courtesy of the Huff Post.

Day off from World Series.  I could either be super productive or completely bored.