Late Bloomers
Whew! Home again after a whirlwind of travels, just in time to write about this week’s topic: Late Bloomers. Take a look at Malcolm Gladwell’s article in the October 20th issue of The New Yorker. Here’s the link:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell
Gladwell profiles writer Ben Fountain whose first book, a collection of short stories, was an award-winning literary sensation. “Ben Fountain’s rise sounds like a familiar story,” Gladwell writes: “the young man from the provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm.” But is it so? Here’s the real story. Fountain’s “breakthrough” came eighteen years after he began to write—a time that included at least thirty rejections for every story he published; a “dark period” that lasted half a decade; and a novel that he spent four years on and then, because he decided it wasn’t very good, put away in a drawer.
Sudden sensation? Fountain found his genius when he was 48.
Some artists, Gladwell tells us, find their skill at a young age, others after only years of painstaking experimentation. It’s the difference between Picasso, who produced his first masterpiece at age twenty, and Cezanne, who didn’t have a one-man show until he was 56. Or between Ben Fountain and Jonathan Safran Foer, who wrote Everything is Illuminated when he was only 19.
What does all this mean for us?
First of all, here at Screw Iowa! we suspect there are a lot more Fountains in the world than Safran Foers. If you’re going to make it through all the years it takes to perfect your art, through all the dark times and all the rejections, you’re going to need help. Gladwell sums it up: “This is the final lesson of the late bloomer: his or her success is highly contingent on the efforts of others.”
And that, of course, is what Screw Iowa! is all about.
So to all of you out there struggling into your thirties, forties, fifties, and even beyond, we say, Hear, hear! And in the meantime, for every draft you consign to the dustbin, for every novel you leave in a drawer, and for every rejection you receive, consider this: some things, like good wine, just take time. What matters most is the work you do along the way—and the people who are there to support you through it.
