You’re Old. So What? Go Write Something!

The skillset for grabbing the brass ring and finding your passion as a senior writer is the same at 16 or 60.

“You’re going to do what?” my friends asked me, with polite slight frowns.

“Go back to school. Finish the degree I abandoned forty years ago. Kind of a bucket list thing.”

There followed murmuring and politeness. Nothing much more said.

But I could read the undercurrent of shock and disbelief, and the unspoken He’s finally lost his mind.

And maybe I had.

I’d had a good long run with a twenty-four-year career in nonprofit management when I retired. I wasn’t going to be traveling around the world on a new yacht, but I wasn’t going to have to move into the homeless camp down by the river either.

Gardening was already a satisfying hobby. Volunteering kept me actively connected to my community and the causes I believed in.

But there was still an itch I couldn’t quite scratch, like those mosquitos that kept biting through my thin t-shirt when I was trimming the hedge.

Then it hit me. There was something that I had always loved. Something that I had leaned on to get me through tough times. Something that I had always pushed aside in favor of more practical concerns, with the promise of getting into it more deeply when I had the time.

Writing.

My sister had laughed at my sappy teen angst poetry in high school. They were still in a shoebox in my closet. I had written journals through many tough times in life. Still had those too. Every job I ever had, I managed to get creative writing into it somehow. And now it wasn’t a matter of finding the time. What I needed to do was make the time I had count.

“A dream has no age limit.

Neither does creativity. Or thought. Or determination.” – Melissa Goutyis, freelance writer, over sixty years old.

Plenty of writers find their calling late in life. You might be surprised that these did:

• Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t publish Little House in the Big Woods until she was sixty.
• Angela Sewell sold her novel  Black Beauty when she was 57.
• Frank McCourt wrote Angela’s Ashes and won a Pulitzer Prize. It was published when he was 66.
• Millard Kaufman created the Mr. Magoo cartoon character. His first novel Bowl of Cherries was published when he was 90.
• Jose Saramago worked at various jobs, including car mechanic, while he wrote several novels. The fourth, Memorial do Convento, brought him international success when he was 60. Saramago went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. He was 76.

What was stopping me? Fear, mostly. Unconsciously I’d bought into the common-held fallacy that after a certain point in life, it was too late. True, there wasn’t a whole lifetime ahead of me to realize this dream, but I didn’t have to re-invent the wheel either. Good writing is a skill. It can be taught. Time didn’t have to be my enemy.

“My personal recipe for success is — Do what you love and don’t look at the clock.” – Ann Landers

I stuck my toe in the water with a mail order creative writing correspondence course. It took me six months to finish the course and get that diploma – with  honors. The sense of satisfaction and accomplishment was huge. Becoming a writer was no longer a just an unrealized possibility.

That’s when I decided to go back and pick up the pieces of my abandoned college career.

My undergraduate degree was conferred when I was 67 years old. I like to tell people that it only took me 50 years to graduate. But better late than never, right?

Robert Kirk Scott is a senior writer who lives and works in Eastern North Carolina. He is currently an MFA candidate in Southern New Hampshire University’s Genre Fiction program. You can read Kirk’s writing at www.robertkirkscott.com.