Can You Start a Writing Career When You Are over 50?
By: Thomas Plummer
Tags: Writing, Life Lessons, Writer, Self, Creativity

Can You Start a Writing Career When You Are over 50?

Chasing the dream of writing when the world says you might be too old

By FG Trade on iStock (image licensed by author)

“Sometimes people ask if I regret “wasting” all those decades before I learned to believe in my writing and take it seriously. No, I tell them, I was gestating, amassing experience and material I tap into when writing my poems today. Things happened as and when they were meant to.” -Rebecca Foust

You are a person of life, of experience, one who has loved, lost, fought and survived the nastiest days of life. You are one who has lived and tasted the sweetness of life but also one who never gave into the bitterness of a life gone wrong. You are a person of a “certain age” and you were born to be a writer.

We celebrate the young writers who achieve success and the internet overflows with lists of the “Best Writers Under 30,” but what about you, the one who might now be over fifty and who has dreamed your entire life of becoming a writer, one who creates the novel that has always been in you or write poetry that makes the rest of us weep?

There has never been a better time in our culture than now to become a writer after fifty. The online world opens up opportunities that never existed for older writers even a decade or so in the past.

You can create a blog, self-publish, build an email army of followers, and today’s traditional publishers are open to authors that are not twenty-one and the next big thing in writing.

“It’s a myth that older writers can’t write for younger audiences. Shakespeare wasn’t fifteen when he wrote Romeo and Juliet.”-Tracy Keenan Wynn

My writing career reflects what is possible for writers who start late in life. My first nonfiction book hit the market when I was forty-six years old, and I have added nine more since then.

My books have been the foundation of a long career as a speaker/source expert, but now, as I move into the latter days of my working life, I have moved into a different stage of my writing career chasing the dream of poetry… and yes, there are a few more books left in me.

Here are a few thoughts about becoming a writer that matters after fifty

Where you will get it right

Life experience

Your perspective is different now compared to when you were twenty because the experiences of your life have shaped the person you now are. You can now, after so many years of being you, write from the depth of a full and rich life instead of imaging what living a life that matters might look like.

The ability to apply wisdom

You are not an interesting person unless the universe has had its way with you. Wisdom is the application of experience to situations in life where you now know where the darkness lies. It is hard to tell a person in their twenties that marrying that toxic person most likely will not work out well over time, but it is fairly easy when you are over fifty to just shake your head and laugh knowing where that relationship is most likely going to end.

You have met thousands of people

You do not have to imagine characters; you have dated them, married a few, have that special child who has become one, drink with more than a few any day of the week and lived surrounded by thousands of them in your working career.

The depth of your life is now the depth of your writing, and if you are a fiction writer, you need to look no further than the last few decades of your life to find the good, bad, slightly crazy and the uglies that all make great characters for your next story. People are the story, and by now you have met enough to fill books for the rest of your life.

You have had time to be well read

If you are a writer, you are most likely a lifetime reader, and going into your fifties you have had time to read at a level not possible by those thirty years young than you are. You now know what you love, who you want to emulate and the genre you want to master.

You know what you want, and what you don’t want from who you are now

If you are after fifty, you now know what you want from the experience of being you, and more importantly, what you want to do with the rest of your life. Writers of a certain age usually have the time and focus to give writing a fair try, something a person working full time and raising kids often cannot manage well.

Your family is now out and on their own, but as we all know that can change in a few hours, and they are living their own lives, which again makes great stories as they mess up everything you told them they would but never listened to you, anyway. You are as busy as you have ever been at this stage of life, but you can now focus and make the time each day it takes to write well.

You are smart to know what you do not know

Older writers are often smarter writers. They will sign up for writing classes, get writing coaches if that is in the budget, and objectively understand the help you need to make this writing thing come true.

“It is none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.”-Ernest Hemingway.

You might be a source expert with a wealth of material and success

In your real life, as opposed to your next writing life, you might have been someone who was the one that gathered information or experience that now needs to be shared with others. If you were a great salesperson, then there are a series of articles, a blog or a book about the lost art of salesmanship.

If you were a teacher, your success would make a great reference for younger teachers finding their own way in the system, not even including the vast array of children you have encountered through the years.

Many of us are or were experts at what we did, but we are so done with that part of our life we forget that what we do every single day might be of importance. It took you years to be good at what you do, why not share that experience with the rest of us?

By Bowie 15 on iStock (image licensed by author

What you will get wrong

You won’t spend time to master social media to support your writing

This might be the biggest barrier to your future writing success. If you have an old flip phone, brag you are not into that social media thing, work off of an old PC that was kicking around when Clinton was president and use your spouse’s phone to look at your grandkids on Facebook, then you will not make it as a writer today.

If you want to write, you need to pull up those high-waisted pants even further, polish those snow-white dad shoes, and master the basics of social media. You will need to blog, build and manipulate email lists, understand the nuances of Facebook and Instagram marketing and maybe move into the online self-publishing world at the very least.

There are thousands of articles on this site that cover many of the basics and many local sources that get you going at least the entry level. Writing is about getting read, but if you will not spend the time to master building a base, then your writing will always remain a brilliant hobby but may never be read beyond the confines of your friends and family.

You write in the past

Writing to get read is learning to write tightly and professionally. Many writers entering the world as born-again writers on the far side of fifty fail to update their writing skills depending on a few writing classes from college now thirty or forty years in the past.

Phrases such as, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” “you can’t judge a book from its cover,” or “you can’t please everyone,” screams “OK Boomer,” and if I have to explain what this term means then start your modernization project on yourself here.

Good writing is timeless. Hemingway’s stripped-down writing, now pushing almost a hundred years old, still rings as if he wrote it yesterday. Do not let your writing reflect a person out of touch and still writing as if this was the 70s.

You become intimidated by the young

This is hard not to do. You read about the success stories of young bloggers generating thousands of reads on the writing sites and you can not help but experience doubt about your sanity as a writer hoping to compete in today’s writing market.

Establishing yourself as a writer over fifty is finding your voice and niche as who you are now in life. Women writing about their sexual exploits when they are twenty-five is situational and workable. People of a certain age writing about their sexual adventures when they were in college is viewed as old people stuck, “back in the day,” unless those adventures are part of a character you write in a novel.

You are not competing against anyone; you are finding your own place, and voice based upon your life experience or expertise. Do not think in terms of better, but think in terms as of how you can be different or bring a new perspective expressed through your writing.

You write what you think you should write, not what you want to write

If you want to be a poet, then be one. Live the dream, do the work, master the social media it takes to get read, but be a poet.

Many people who want to write late in life want to copy someone who is successful. Rebecca Foust, cited in the first quote, found her way as a poet later in life, but when she started chasing her writing dream by enrolling in a class, she started as a short story writer. She had kept her poetry hidden until reading one of her pieces in the class, which resonated so well with the group she pursued that course as her primary writing.

“Don’t you find it odd that when you are a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you’re older, somehow they act offended if you even try.”-Ethan Hawke.

You won’t seek support groups

Older writers are usually isolated from those already writing. You need support groups, or at least a network of like-minded people chasing the same dream.

Find a writing group, take those classes and network, sign up for writing workshops that get you away from home and out of your natural element, and work with an editor or coach that can shred your work and make you better.

There are sites dedicated to writers who start late, such as Bloom… “Late” according to whom?” The more you reach out the more successful you will become but writing alone and never finding people who are as terrified and unsure of the process as you are will help you stay in the game longer.

Dedicating the time

I have written about this several times in other pieces, but the minimum it takes to me, as a writer with forty years of experience, is you must read for thirty minutes a day and then write for at least thirty minutes a day seven days a week until you die, or forget why you are sitting at the desk with that pen in your hand.

Realistic expectations

Some of you might write for the sheer perfection of expressing what you feel and struggle with in life and not give a damn about the money, and that is a life well lived. Others of you will want to write and chase the money, and to me that is a better choice since writing for publication forces to learn to be a better writer.