I seriously wish I could just do it the way your mom is! I can’t seem to get “over myself” though. I start writing and immediately think “who the fuck am I to be writing?! How fucking pretentious can I be?”
People say you aren’t your job, but I can’t help believing all I am is an uneducated factory worker and it affects my motivation tremendously.
To be fair, she did not start writing fiction until her 70s. She wrote a couple of academic books back in the late 1960s and that was it. She even got out of academia by the 80s and did absolutely no more writing.
But when my father died and she was looking for something to do with the extra time she had, she picked up writing fiction. She’s gotten some good reviews too. Obviously nothing even close to the level of Stephen King, but she is published by a legitimate publisher.
That said, now that she’s in her 80s and her memory is not what it was, there are some pretty serious continuity issues I’ve had to point out before she submits manuscripts now.
But it’s clearly never too late to start… and considering some of the absolutely shitty writers in this world, I wouldn’t feel pretentious about it if I were you. You can’t possibly be worse than, for example, E. L. James. And people make movies out of her bad S&M Twilight fan fic.
I seriously wish I could just do it the way your mom is! I can’t seem to get “over myself” though. I start writing and immediately think “who the fuck am I to be writing?! How fucking pretentious can I be?”
People say you aren’t your job, but I can’t help believing all I am is an uneducated factory worker and it affects my motivation tremendously.
To be fair, she did not start writing fiction until her 70s. She wrote a couple of academic books back in the late 1960s and that was it. She even got out of academia by the 80s and did absolutely no more writing.
But when my father died and she was looking for something to do with the extra time she had, she picked up writing fiction. She’s gotten some good reviews too. Obviously nothing even close to the level of Stephen King, but she is published by a legitimate publisher.
That said, now that she’s in her 80s and her memory is not what it was, there are some pretty serious continuity issues I’ve had to point out before she submits manuscripts now.
But it’s clearly never too late to start… and considering some of the absolutely shitty writers in this world, I wouldn’t feel pretentious about it if I were you. You can’t possibly be worse than, for example, E. L. James. And people make movies out of her bad S&M Twilight fan fic.