This may be all well-and-good for those who’ve been working for years and years at their writing-you lucky so and so’s 🙂-but what about folks like me who started “late”? I began writing in my late 30s went to grad school of creative writing when I was 40 and, sure, I now have a bunch of stories in print and a book that did very well with a small publisher ( Elysium, Aqueduct Press). You will be able to basically steal from yourself! On the contrary, one day when your career is finally moving, you will find that pile of rejected and/or unsold work will be a wealth of material to draw from to either present to your agent or publisher for publication, or to gather ideas from for your next new project. But that doesn’t mean that the story or even novel is dead. So, what do you do if you are producing all this writing but it’s also constantly being rejected? Well, we writers have a saying, “Trunk it,” which means that we file it away somewhere. So aspiring writers should be constantly writing and sending out work. Sometimes the work simply is not in tune with what’s selling at the moment. It can take years to get a writing career going and that’s not always a reflection on the quality of the writing. Whether that book remains under their bed until the day they die or sells to a publisher, it tells a writer that “yes, you can do this!” The second, or sophomore, book tells a writer that the first book wasn’t a fluke and that “yes, you can do this again and again!” It is possible, maybe even likely, that neither of these books sell-at least not right away.

Yet, I can clearly attest to anyone that a bunch of unsold books gathering dust under their mattress means that they are literally lying on a pile of gold like a sleeping dragon.Ĭompleting a first book is a major milestone for any writer.

I know that to them it feels like they are accumulating failure. Folks who have those have no idea how much of an advantage they have.

But for me, “being late” means that I don’t have several rejected books under my bed. For others, it would be because I didn’t begin writing when I was eleven years old.

For most, I suppose this would be about my age. My career began “late” by many people’s standards. These are words I wish I had heard years ago when I started this journey. “It takes a lot of work to make it as a writer, and the writing isn’t the hardest part.”

Elysium by jennifer marie brissett