A late bloomer

I'm one of those dreamers who believe they can write a masterpiece by 25. At 14, I thought I would write it by 17. At 20, I've given myself 5 years to get it done. I don't know what it is. It's this perception that youth produces newness, something that never has been done before.

That was until I read this article in The New Yorker. It's about the Late Bloomers of the literary and art worlds. If you are getting frustrated with your writing, I really encourage you to read it by clicking here. It does put everything in perspective about how the greats produced their work.

Read how Mark Twain used to work:

"Galenson quotes the literary critic Franklin Rogers on Twain’s trial-and-error method: “His routine procedure seems to have been to start a novel with some structural plan which ordinarily soon proved defective, whereupon he would cast about for a new plot which would overcome the difficulty, rewrite what he had already written, and then push on until some new defect forced him to repeat the process once again.”

Twain fiddled and despaired and revised and gave up on “Huckleberry Finn” so many times that the book took him nearly a decade to complete. The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.

The author uses the example of celebrated author Ben Fountain throughout the piece, and looks at his experience of a "late bloomer".

A very interesting story that shows you shouldn't hurry things along. If it's meant to be it's meant to be. Be yourself and don't worry about others.