Am I too old to be a bestselling novelist? (Holy crap, this is really long, and rambling, sorry)

how seventeen-year-olds are publishing popular novels with little cover blurbs exclaiming, "_______ is not even out of high school, and this is the best book EVER!" Sometimes, the cover blurbs are written by members of Really Cool Bands.

A TERRIBLE measure of worthiness by any standard.

You aren't too old (I don't think there really is such a thing). Even though I agree with you about the unfortunate trend I think lying about your age would be a mistake. Surely any acclaim you acquired in such a way would risk being lost once the deceit was discovered.

http://trashotron.com/agony/reviews/2005/aylett-lint.htm

The age of 50 marks authors' peak
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4540705.stm

You are very talented. Get on with it. Enjoy it.

Second: there’s no point worrying about the age part. A lot of the concerns in that article are perfectly accurate—fresh young novelists do tend to get bigger advances and more marketing hype lavished on them, yes. But really, if you’re dedicated enough to really work your way through a novel—which, I’m with you, is a damned arduous project—I have to believe that advance money and fame aren’t really your goals. (If those were your goals, I’d hope you wouldn’t be interested in books in general!) Just write: write with as much dedication as you can, and be content with whatever pace the pages come out, and just work on writing a novel you think is good. There’s nothing you will get out of publishing that will substitute for knowing you’ve written something good.

And yes, on the time and work issues, I’m very much with you. I’m twenty-seven and working on a novel I think is going well, but the pressure of paying off student loans is combining with that thirty-year-old “what have you done with your life” landmark to make me really wish I could finish this thing off and get started on the process of selling it. I look ahead and I realize that making this novel truly work could take years and years of my life, years chained to the same idea, writing and rewriting and throwing away half of what gets done along the way. But this is what it means to write novels, really, and if I knew some magical shortcut I sure wouldn’t share it with anyone else.

In any case I feel for you, I know every one of those feelings far too well. But my advice remains: really, don’t worry. Don’t worry about anything else other than trying to write a decent book. In those terms, you’re extraordinarily young. The fact that your previous writing always looks bad to you is a good sign, obviously, because it means that you’re learning. You can use this to your advantage: try new things in brief spurts, experimenting and expanding your range with short pieces, letting yourself develop. But don’t let that sense of development cripple you. You can take award-winning octogenarian writers and they’ll tell you the same thing—that they’re still learning, that in some cases they could do their previous books much better with all the skills they’ve learned now. Expecting to be at the peak of your powers for a first book is an easy thing to get sucked into (this crippled me for a little while), but it’s a completely unreasonable expectation: you do the best you can, and if you get better from there on, that’s all for the best.

I have no good advice for the block other than this: make a discipline out of writing. This is actually one of the best things an MFA program winds up doing for you—you’re forced to sit down to writing as a task, as a craft, and in the end I think that’s the only way to get through the hard work required to finish a good novel. Try scheduling writing-time and using it—even if you only write three sentences, even if you write something unrelated to any project you’re working on, just write. Don’t fall into the other half of being crippled by perfection, this thing where you don’t let yourself write crap. Writing crap is part of the process; let yourself do it, and work through it, and you’ll eventually come around to making it work.

I’ll stop there, since I don’t know anything about your work or your life situation or your writing style, and so much turns out to be completely dependent on that. But seriously: don’t worry. The fact that you’re committed to getting something done is really all you’re going to need here—and worrying about the ins and outs of age and publishing is just a big meaningless distraction from worrying about writing something great. Which I hope you’ll do, ya know?

And Jordan--I haven't been to the Highbury, but I'd really like to see your band. I'll try to make it!
x-post: I think I might take you up on that. Thank you!

I wonder what achievers worry about.

(Yay nabisco and his fine thoughts!)

One of my favourite books is The Naked Civil Servant, the story of an old man who never did anything particularly interesting except exist. Old people are much more interesting, to me at least.

So if you feel like you’re still improving, just work on whatever sketches or shorts will keep you improving. If a long project occurs to you, try it out without ever intending to complete it—just for the experience of running into those long-project workshops. Write things you wind up thinking suck, and write things just for fun, because that’s where you should be—just remember to push yourself here and there, say, trying to finish off a short piece that you already think isn’t very good. Writing can be as practice-practice-practice as anything else, and it’ll probably help you to write in that spirit—not trying to take over the literary world, just practice, figure some things out, and work your way closer to the point where you’re really ready for something big.

Taking a workshop is a good way to keep your hand in, and a good way to remind yourself that you're in the same boat as everyone else -- they're not cranking out revelatory novels either. And not all MFA programs need a GRE, though I don't think you need to worry about that for a while yet.

I've been waiting for nearly a year just to hear back from an agent, and that was with a referral. It's a slow process, and anything that's popular now, editors already have plenty of it both in the works and in the slush pile, so trying to emulate that -- even if "being a very young author" were something you could emulate -- won't get you anywhere.

Write, write a lot, write tons, write more than that, write yesterday and a week from now, and don't risk making your first novel your only one by trying to fit everything you love into it. I'm writing my eighth novel, not counting high school composition notebook trash, and I learn something new about pacing and structure every week -- more importantly, I'm learning things I had no way of guessing were there to be learned when all I was doing was short stories. It's like moving from vegetables to meat: a million carrots teach you nothing about roast beef.

Thank God the learning curve is more forgiving than with short stories: if an eighth novel were as far along it as an eighth short story is, I'd be looking forward to having something decent written around the time I hit retirement age.

There's an idea for a satirical novel. Seriously.

FWIW authors only have to return an advance when the finished manuscript is rejected by the publisher. Of course if your book doesn't earn back the advance, you don't get any furture royalties.

I just keep telling myself that writing is like being a director, you're still considered a wunderkinde or enfant terrible if you're under 40. (The cut off point for being considered as a Granta Young Novelist is 40.)

The thing that hampers me most is the sheer predictability of what I'm trying to do: 'oh another novel written by a journalist ... yawn'

Since you asked.

I am sure, for example, that routine questioning of the average white inhabitants of housing estates in Barking would produce strenuous, heartfelt denials of racism.

Nick Hornby is not young, though

have you read '31 songs'? i think this is key. as i said, everything about the book that i have read spelled 'awful'. same goes for '31 songs', which i also have not read. in an ideal world we'd read everything before coming to judgement but life's too short.

Nonetheless this is a kneejerk reaction symptomatic of institutionalised racism, namely that the only reason black people achieve anything is Because They're Black, which is just one microscopic state away from saying that the only reason black people get allocated council houses is Because They're Black.

no, because the PR for the book strongly positioned the book as being by a Young Black Writer. a *very* young black writer. it's the publishing/media nexus who have made this, rather than the quality of the book, the focus of discussion. if anyone wants to argue that it was published on its merits as literature, they should do so, but it;s too easy to cry racist here.

posts should come with pronunciation keys.

Stencil, yeah, there's not the same risk of active debt with book publishing, but there is the same future-viability thing. If you get some massive advance that you can't earn out, that's a blot for the next one you try to sell -- "that last book didn't even earn through the advance" -- and so on. Big advance means high expectations, which is a bad thing if those expectations are unreasonable; on the other hand, it means more attention and marketing effort and all of that stuff, which is a good thing if the expectations are reasonable.