Are you about to peak — or are you past your writing prime?

Because a writer produces his/her best work by the age of…

…twenty-eight?

This week, someone said to me, “Prose writers peak when they’re young. They write at their best between twenty-two and twenty-eight.”

(Who can guess the age of the speaker? Yup…)

Since the age of twenty-eight is buried in my dim and very distant past (I’ve almost done twenty-two twice), my initial reaction was, “Rubbish.” But, personal axes aside, is there any truth in it?

Let’s Google.

In 2010, Max Fisher delved into the issue of ‘creative peak’ in his Atlantic Wire article. I find it somewhat poignant that at the age of 54, both Sam Tanenhaus and Kazuo Ishiguro believed that youth was the key to great and lasting output, whereas Jonah Lehrer, aged 28, believed it was all yet to come. Clearly, no one believed (or wanted to admit that they believed) that they were peaking right there and then — prime time live, so to speak.

A vaguely balanced quote from the same article is allegedly that of Gladwell (arguably Galenson), who implied that different people may peak at different ages — via categorisation into two key ‘routes’:

… Gladwell says creativity can be divided into two types, “conceptual and experimental.” Conceptual thinkers peak young, but experimental thinkers peak old

— but at no point does the article fully disseminate the relevance of age from a larger perspective, for example as a measure of particular experience or life stage. A handful of personal opinions does not an argument make; a small number of subjective responses provides only an anecdotal and biased information base.

We need numbers. Out of a sample of, say, fifty brilliant authors, how many wrote their best work before the age of twenty-eight? And, more importantly if we are to ever consider this a predictive tool, why? Fifty authors might not be enough to say, because there are so many variables that could affect writing performance, e.g.

• how was their health?
• were they married; did they have someone to support them financially, a spouse who ripped up drafts, or a baby to keep them awake at night?
• were they male, female, or non-binary, gay or straight, religious or agnostic… and did they write in a time or place where that made a difference to their success?
• were there any massive culture changes in their writing lifetime — e.g. did they write before or after a war? Did they emigrate?
• are they still alive — might they yet produce something better?

On this latter point; if they are alive, they are surely ineligible for assessment because they may yet peak — and hence the question can only be answered by assessing the overall performance of dead authors, which in turn means it may not be relevant to the current time. This is, therefore, one big dead duck already, as far as predictive function goes, in this time of e-books and self-publishing that is so different from previous print eras — no?

The scientist in me has yet to see a body of data that convinces me of an optimal age for writing prose.

The writer in me says, write when you will, as you will and how you will. That is, after all, the joy of it — the imagining, the writing, the fearless — or fearful — pouring of words into the ether.

But for the fun of it, I’ve checked out some of my favourite books, and the age of the authors. I say age — I mean, alleged age (thank you, Wikipedia). So, a pseudo-random selection of books that I have enjoyed recently, and their aged authors:

(All ages are approximate, calculated using Wikipedia
birth/publication dates and omitting to count months.)

Louis de Bernières (1954-) — Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1994) and Birds Without Wings (2004). Approx. age: 40 & 50 (debut in 1990, age 36).

Emma Donoghue (1969-) — Room (2010). Approx. age: 41 (debut 1994, age 25).

Sebastian Faulks (1953-) — Birdsong (1993) and On Green Dolphin Street (2001). Approx. age: 40 & 48 (debut 1984, age 31).

Vanessa Gebbie (?) — The Coward’s Tale (2011). Age unknown.

Khaled Hosseini (1965-) — The Kite Runner (2003, debut) and A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007). Approx. age: 38 & 42.

Harper Lee (1926-) — To Kill a Mockingbird (1960, debut). Approx. age: 34.

Adeline Yen Mah (1937-) — Falling Leaves (1997, debut). Approx. age: 60.

Rani Manicker (?) — The Rice Mother (2002, debut). Age unknown.

Cormac McCarthy (1933-) — The Road (2006). Approx. age: 73 (debut in 1965, age 32).

Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) — The Sea, The Sea (1978). Approx. age: 59 (debut 1959, age 40).

Patrick O’Brian (1914-2000) — Master and Commander (1969). Approx. age: 55 (debut 1930, age 26).

J. K. Rowling (1965-) — Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997, debut). Approx. age: 32.

Arundhati Roy (1961-) — The God of Small Things (1997, debut). Approx. age: 36.

CURRENTLY READING
Lionel Shriver (1957-) — We Need to Talk about Kevin (2003). Approx. age: 46 (debut 1986, age 29).

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) — Under Milk Wood (b/cast 1954). Approx. age: 39 +1 posthumous (poetry debut in 1934, age 20).

J. R. R. Tolkein (1892-1973) — The Lord of the Rings (1954-5). Approx. age: 62 (fiction debut 1936, age 44 but 1911 for poetry, age 19).

Alice Walker (1944-) — The Color Purple (1982). Approx. age: 38 (debut 1970, age 26).

Just flicking through these few books, several things become apparent — I like books written by men and women, from various parts of the world, who were mostly published between the ages of 30 and 90 years. In my recent trawling of Amazon, Smiths and local bookshops, I have not read anything by an author who was under thirty at the time of publication (although, of course, some of the work is likely to have been written much earlier than it was published). Clearly this is a small sample and reflects my personal preference, but even so, what about those writers in their twenties?

Looking at the debuts of the above authors, Lionel Shriver, Alice Walker, Emma Donoghue, and Patrick O’Brian had prose published in their twenties and a quick Google shows that there are plenty more available online. On her blog, Faye L Booth speaks about people’s reactions to her being published as a historical novelist in her twenties, describing in a pragmatic manner how writers of any age can be interested in, and inspired to write about, history. Likewise, in the short fiction categories (especially flash), many younger writers are published online and in print.

If, in previous years, many writers have had to wait years to trudge through the traditional publishing route, culminating in publication in their thirties, the advent of self-publishing and online journals may well provide us with a flood of work written by writers still in their twenties — vibrant, young, and hot off the press.

So, back to my original question — is it true that a writer’s best prose is likely to come from the age of twenty-two to twenty-eight?

The answer is, I don’t know. But at the age of forty-two, I’m now the same age as Khaled Hosseini was when A Thousand Splendid Suns was published, and I’ve got a decade to work on my art before I’m the age of Patrick O’Brian when he started the Aubrey-Maturin series that carried him through three more decades.

In terms of writing, I don’t believe that my age limits… anything at all.