I was 45 when I had my first fiction published and I’ve published at least one story a year since then (although there have been years that it’s felt like I just barely met that goal). I think my MFA thesis advisor assigned Fitzgerald to me as a role model of a late-in-life writer (it’s amusing to think of my then-45-year-old self as “old” a decade later). But like Fitzgerald, it’s not like I wasn’t writing before. I’ve written my whole life and while I took multiple extended breaks from sending things out and I have notebooks full of unfinished stories, I still wrote and after really pushing myself back into writing (and more importantly, finishing) when I was coming up on 40 years old and subsequently pursuing an MFA to further polish my craft, I managed to get that first bit of external validation in the form of a published story (one which was paid, and in print). The seeking of validation is a bit brutal and soul-crushing (at best I’ve gotten 1 acceptance for 25 rejections, overall it’s more like 49 rejections for each acceptance), but as W. P. Kinsella said, it’s not the publishing that makes a writer, but the writing.

And a bit more apropos of the article, I’d add that to a large extent, I think that the 45 years of life leading up to my first publication were a big part of what made me able to write something worth publishing.