The Right Age to Start Writing

On Monday, I was on an author’s panel at the reopening of the Glendale Library. I also listened to two other panels. Something that struck me about the other authors’ comments—a number of them had started writing at about eight years old.

Thinking back over my own writing career, my path was different. Sure, I guess you could say my first published work was a story in second grade titled, “The Hurt Bird,” that Mrs. Russell printed on a mimeograph sheet, but my serious decision to write began in 2001 and my first published short story, “Never Trust a Poison Dart Frog,” appeared in an anthology called, Who Died in Here? in 2004 and my first novel, Retirement Homes Are Murder, in 2007 when I was sixty-two. By then I had some life experiences to apply to fiction writing.

There is no right or wrong time to start writing. The important thing is to start and keep writing