It’s Never Too Late To Create
In the two months since I published my debut novel Memorial Day, a few friends and a couple of readers have asked me, “How did you decide to publish your novel… at your age?” I will admit, I do not usually feel old, except when I return to some form of exercise I have not done for a while and my body tells me, “Wow, you are getting older!”
Interestingly, when I think about what lies ahead “at my age,” I think less now about the writing I could have done if I had the confidence to start publishing when I was younger. Instead, I think about how much writing is still left in me if I sit down and write every day until all my stories are told. Could I write a book a year for ten years? You betcha!
There’s a scene in my novel Memorial Day where the main character Joe, and his best friend Bill, have been trying to hold their breath as they walk past the cemetery on their way to school. They are unable to complete the challenge for weeks, and when their classmate Peggy no longer can stand their bickering, she attempts the challenge herself and – spoiler alert– she succeeds. Joe is so astonished, that he begs her to tell him how she did it, to which she replies:
“You two kept arguing about how far you had to go from the start,” Peggy said, still gasping for air. “I just kept my eye on that white birch tree over there, and thought about how much closer I was getting. I guess I didn’t even think about how hard it was to hold my breath until the very end.”
That is how I feel when people ask me why I decided it was time to start publishing my novels “at my age.” If I were to keep looking back and ruminating over why I did not start sharing my work with the world in my twenties, it almost certainly would undermine my belief that a book a year for AT LEAST ten years is achievable.
One of my favorite lines about age, time, and creativity comes from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. She poses the following hypothetical conversation:
“QUESTION: Do you know how old I’ll be by the time I learn to play piano?”
“ANSWER: The same age you will be if you don’t.”
Like Joe and Bill in Memorial Day, I could keep looking back and focus on how far I had come from the start without being productive, or I could look ahead, like Peggy, and focus on how much closer I am getting to the goal. I now choose the goal.
Like many creative people, there was an event in my life that finally clarified for me what was at stake. Even though I had aspired to write novels from a very young age, I always felt that there would be a time in the future when everything would fall into place and finally I would be ready to put together all of the work I had amassed. I had diligently curated all of my writing going back to my freshman year in high school, passing it between various sized floppy disks and electronic devices until, finally, it made its way onto an external hard drive, which I was certain meant that I was beginning to take my writing seriously.
A year later, after losing a very close friend who was an excellent writer, I decided it really was time to get serious. I logged into my external hard drive, ready to mine my creative archive, only to find that the monthly backups of my entire computer had started overwriting the older files on the drive beginning in month 7. According to the data recovery shops I went to way back then, because my older writing archive only had been a folder on the hard drive, and not on the computer that I had been backing up, the several months of full overwrites meant that none of it could be recovered.
(I may still write by hand, but this is the reason I store EVERYTHING in the cloud now.)
It was all gone! Every piece of writing that I had not physically printed and preserved, from my freshman year in high school forward, was completely gone. I was both devastated and… relieved. Devastated because I felt that I had lost a massive part of my life. It felt as if I had been cut in half creatively, because nearly half of my creative life was gone. On the other hand, I also felt liberated because I knew that the only way for me to move forward was to create anew.
I could not look back at my previous work and tell myself that I would share it when I am ready, or that I would revise that one act play and enter a competition, or expand that short story into a novella and enter a writing contest. Aside from the snippets of dialogue and the choruses of a few songs, the only thing remaining of all that work was the original need to create something – ANYTHING!
I’ll be honest, it took me another 10 years to accept fully what a gift I had been given. For a while, I thought that it was further evidence that IT never was going to happen. Then, I realized that the ONLY reason IT had not happened to that point was that I had not DONE IT!
I had been waiting for the perfect time and the perfect piece to share. Finally, I had to accept that the only time I have is now, and the only perfect piece for me to share is one that is done.
Every day now, I try to keep my eye on how much closer I am getting to my goal, rather than how far I have had to go from the start. Sometimes, starting over is not the obstacle we see at first, but rather permission to create ourselves anew.
I would love to hear from you whether you have experienced re-starting your creative journey. Re-post or re-share this blog entry, and hit subscribe at the bottom of the page on brendanwalshbooks.com.