Never Too Late

It’s never too late. I know you can feel sometimes as if your best creative days are behind you, that without the furtive, twitchy energy of youth, nothing you write will be good enough, or that the whole process of looking for a publisher and then promoting your book you will just exhaust you the way the idea of raising little children again seems like signing up for bootcamp. Maybe it’s time to just garden and watch reruns of Barney Miller. You could, except that’s boring, and the days are long, and you’ve got ideas. Oh, why hadn’t you started that book when you were thirty? Were you really that busy?

Yes, you were, but that’s not why you didn’t start it. You were preoccupied learning to be an adult, seeing if you could take care of yourself and then those little ones who came along. Nothing actually prepares you for it, after all. School doesn’t, your parents can’t, how-to books won’t. Life is a learn-as-you-go endeavor, and you were learning. You were learning how to live your life, which no one had ever done before. Sometimes you wished someone had so they could tell you what to do next, but in the end, you were glad your life was and always had been your own.

Still, that book nagged at you. You wrote some little things. You liked it. Writing is different than most of what you did, the way you lost yourself in it, the way you felt that you both disappeared and were more yourself than at any other time. Wouldn’t it be nice to do that every day? Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what came of it? Are you really too old?

Of course you’re not, but you still feel that something is missing. You get to a certain age and the relentless need to prove yourself, to know that others will think well of you, has finally begun to wane. Yes, it still arises now and then, but not like before, not like when you were learning to be an adult. You just don’t care anymore. You wonder if it’s possible to sustain a project without that. Is that hunger what drives us to our best work? Or is it something else, something more like what you knew when you were a child, when survival meant little, and fun meant everything.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com