Starting to Write Later in Life

Read the 245 author biographies in this archive one after another and a pattern appears that the agency never commented on. A large share of the authors the Harris Literary Agency listed between 1998 and 2009 had already finished one working life before they began another at a desk. Bankers, neurosurgeons, meteorologists, lumberjacks, medical-industry executives, a fire-protection engineer of eighty-two. Their biographies, on the agency's listing pages, are short and often awkward, and they are the most candid documents on the site about what it is like to start late.

The pattern in the biographies

John Hemphill's listing for Tainted Blessing states it outright: fiction writing, it says, is his fourth career. The first three were a professorship in economics with a textbook to show for it, executive positions at a research firm and in retail, and nearly a decade as an expert witness. The novel came out of his childhood on the family's Kansas farms, which is to say it had been waiting through all three.

Sam Phillips, whose listing for Deadly Waters is one of the plainest on the site, began as a bank messenger while still in high school, was promoted to teller within a year, and rose over a working lifetime to president and chief executive of a Miami bank. He retired from the industry in 1987 and took up writing, a subject the biography says he had found a liking for while studying nights at the University of Virginia. His books, it adds, are flavoured with the community banking he knew, where the people who murdered, embezzled and lied did so for money.

Eleanor Pari Eckardt worked in office administration until 1974, then spent more than twenty years as a corporate vice president writing speeches, pamphlets, training scripts and warranties for a company in Boca Raton. Her listing for Omerta records what followed: after she retired, in 1996, "nothing was quite as delicious as learning the techniques of fiction." The touch of self-mockery she adds, that retired should be read as downsized, is not the kind of detail the agency's request for a pertinent biography had in mind, and it is the line a reader remembers.

The list goes on. Paul Mark Tag, a Navy research meteorologist, retired from government service in 2001 to write fiction full time. Tom Baker took early retirement from a twenty-five year career in Tulsa in 1998 and then began writing. Howard Jenkins retired from corporate life in early 2004 to write novels. Max C. Richards retired in 1997 from the law firm he had founded in Tucson and called novel-writing his new vocation. W. Bradford DeLong practised and taught neurosurgery in San Francisco for more than thirty years before his first novel. John Hinman practised family medicine for thirty-five years. Elliott Stephenson, a retired structural and fire protection engineer, offered his first book on casino gambling at the age of eighty-two. Fran Abram, an accounting clerk with a 1969 biology degree, began writing with a corporate procedures manual, took up fiction when a member of her book club challenged her to do better, and had completed a manuscript within six months.

What these biographies share is not regret. Almost none of them apologise for the years spent elsewhere. They describe the earlier work in detail, often more detail than the agency could have wanted, and then they describe the writing as the thing that came next, as naturally as a move to a new city.

Going back to school first

A second group did something harder before they wrote a word: they went back to study, as adults, with jobs and families already in place.

The most striking case is Grant Rodwell, whose listing for Gommera Woman says he was born in 1944 into a poor family in the New South Wales high country, left school at fourteen without ever attending high school, and worked as a lumberjack until he was twenty-two. An accident with a chainsaw and what the biography calls a brisk, forthright conversation with the local doctor sent him to correspondence courses for his university matriculation exams. Four years later he was a schoolteacher in Tasmania. He went on to a school principalship in Hobart and a doctorate, university teaching, a deanship and a second doctorate, and then to Australian historical fiction, which the listing calls his first love.

Jean Collins, author of Men of Greed, started college at night eight years after she finished high school, while building a career in sales, and graduated magna cum laude. Her first novel was written in hotel rooms on business trips, the click of the keys the only sound in the room, as her biography puts it. Nancy Palmie, author of The Road to Mama Bear, dropped out in her second year and returned, in her own count, ten years, three jobs and two daughters later, to take an associate degree in technical writing, then a bachelor's, then an MBA. Zenaida Hernandez-Smith, born in Cuba in 1933 and in exile in the United States from 1959, worked in fashion design for most of her adult years, returned to writing in 1991 through a graduate program in Massachusetts, and enrolled at Florida Atlantic University in 1993. Doyle McKim's wife suggested he finish his education; he did, at a vocational college on Lake Washington, and was taken on there as a teacher.

None of them treats the return to study as remarkable. The question an adult asks before enrolling, whether it is too late to go back to college at forty, is one these biographies answer in passing and in the negative, not by argument but by the plain fact of the degree sitting in the sentence before the book.

What the first career gives the second

The agency's own guidelines asked for the author's pertinent biography, and the word pertinent was doing real work. For these writers the earlier career was pertinent because it was the material. Phillips's bankers; James Fontana's trial judge in Reverse Onus, written by a man who had joined the Ontario Court of Justice in 1984; Don Nelson's DEA agent, after Nelson's own twenty-one years in the DEA; Elizabeth Turner Calloway's convention business in A Meeting of Minds, after eighteen years running one. Howard Jenkins's listing quotes the oldest advice there is, to write about what you know, and says his first novel to some extent followed it.

The other thing the first career gives is a way of working. David C. Pearce, a West Point graduate who spent thirty years as an engineer, wrote that the career gave him "an ability to plan and organize complex tasks, such as writing a novel." Albert Millspaugh, who worked as a technical writer and then ran a corporate publications department until 1990, and who lists a Writer's Digest novel-writing course among his education, had already written for a living in another register. A procedures manual, a research report, a legal brief and a chapter are not the same thing, but a person who has finished a hundred of the first three knows how to finish.

What the career cannot give is the habit of describing yourself briefly. The listings make this visible. Ralph Morales's biography is a résumé set out in headings, with age, degrees and honours in list form. Others compress a lifetime into one sentence, as Hemphill does with his fourth career. The problem is the one every adult faces when a form asks for a personal statement: a long life has to be cut to the parts that explain why you are here now. A guide to writing a personal statement after 35 addresses exactly that cut, and the better biographies in this catalog, Eckardt's and Hemphill's among them, had already made it on their own.

What it says now

The modern part of this is easy to state without numbers. Adults who come to writing, or to study, after another career arrive with two things the young do not have: material, and the proof that they can finish long tasks. They also arrive with less time and more to lose, which is why the biographies here so often mention a retirement, the sale of a business, an accident or a bereavement as the hinge. For Mark Casper it was a back injury that ended a dental career at forty-four; for Lisa Manfrede-Smith it was her husband's death, after which she trained as a respiratory therapist, and she later resigned that post to give more time to writing.

The archive does not know how most of these stories ended. The majority of the 245 listings name no publisher, and the agency's record of sales is short. That is not a discouragement so much as a correction of scale. The biographies were written at the moment of the attempt, by people who had decided the attempt was worth making late, and the site that kept them was a working agency's shop window rather than a hall of fame. Read that way, the memoirs and true stories in the catalog, many of them by people writing about the lives they had already led, are the most direct answer the archive gives to anyone wondering whether to begin.