4 ms·

How Penelope Fitzgerald became a late blooming novelist

49 points by lermontov 3y ago

dhosek 3y ago
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.
- HenryOliver87 3y ago
  What's interesting about PF, of course, is that she just didn't do very much writing earlier on. Glad to hear you have made some progress!
  - dhosek 3y ago
    But she did. From the article: > The other answer given is that she wasn’t, in fact, such a late starter. Critics point to her childhood stories, anonymous reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, her probable contributions to Desmond’s history of the Irish Guards, and the literary magazine she and Desmond ran together when the children were little. There were also four short stories she wrote earlier in life: two as a young child, two in the 1950s when she was a mother. (Fitzgerald wrote very few short stories overall.) I would guess that were I to die today, there would be very little evidence that I wrote anything before 2014.
    - soneca 3y ago
      I wouldn’t consider that much writing over 30 years (from 15 to 45 yo). Fiction as just 4 short stories, being 2 as a child. I’d would say that’s very little writing before your first novel.
- breck 3y ago
  > 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. "Before you can write the book, you have to be the book."
  - hi-v-rocknroll 3y ago
    The greatest concentration of interesting folks are the elderly on the fringes of society. If a writer ever wanted to find an ideal biography subject if they weren't the book, there is a demographic of sane, elderly, rough sleepers on each coast of America who have experienced more than the average person can possibly imagine.
    - defrost 3y ago
      The lead actor of Charlie's Country has an extensive biography that goes broader and deeper than many might expect. Just the Dennis Hopper stories alone make a tale worth telling.
      - hi-v-rocknroll 3y ago
        Nice. I think I've heard of that title. I've met a few gems amongst a cavalcade of colorful characters who perhaps could be captured fairly between pen and paper to record an echo of human splendor that should live beyond time. - A paranoid but happy and cynical gentleman with long, scraggly hair like a wizard from the Appalachias who was a military aircraft electrician and an Apple rework tech. Stories spanning every feeling with hilarious exaggerations for emphasis. - A former writer at big name NY newspaper, ex-hippie, and crab fisherman who had quite the life of drugs, women, and was part of it. Body might be shot, but a mind sharper than people who are 30 now without hyperbole. Knows where, when, and who of the cool spots of then and now. - You'd swear he was dangerous or black Santa Claus. Nope, sweetest and coolest guy in the world. Picking cotton, keeping out of trouble during times that were turbulent, elevator repair, and teaching.
        defrost 3y ago
- soperj 3y ago
  What did you do before fiction? Is it worth it monetarily? or did you have to change a lot of things to pursue the dream?
DoreenMichele 3y ago
The article indicates that she likely ghostwrote a piece published under her husband's name during the period when many feel she "wasn't writing." I am reminded of the plot for the biopic Collette about a French writer whose initial success was from works published under her husband's name. In the biopic Out of Africa, Karen Blixen is portrayed as learning to tell stories orally to her nieces and later her guests. The man who later becomes her lover gifts her a pen and tells her both "we pay our storytellers here" and "write them down sometime." Blixen was a socialite who was able to access family money by marrying her "lover's brother." When they divorced, she was sterile from syphilis contracted from her unfaithful husband who slept around casually and probably couldn't use marriage and family inheritance a second time as a means to support herself. She also published some of her works under a male name. And I read a piece called Homme de Plume on Jezebel that told the story of a woman writer submitting her work to publishers under a male name and getting much more positive feedback for the exact same manuscript. So gender discrimination is certainly real, but I'm a woman and I don't see getting a sex change operation to fix my issues. Some women downplay their gender by using initials, like JK Rowling. But the thing that interests me is the pieces I might control in some way on my end. Both Penelope Fitzgerald and Karen Blixen appear to have had no ambition initially. They both appear to have been content to try to make life work financially by being wives, the role society expected of them, and it seems likely they only sought to develop a career as paid writers when it became clear they couldn't make life work via that means. I think women get generally inculcated from birth with the idea that a "successful" woman living The Good Life is a woman who married well and had kids and put her husband's career and children's welfare first. Career women tend to get vilified as bad mothers and seem to divorce frequently, possibly because if a woman has sufficient income she doesn't need to try to make a bad marriage work. So I think women tend to lack mental models men seem to be inculcated with and this seems to be a separate issue from the much more readily recognized issue of gender discrimination. No clue how to fix it. It doesn't seem to be part of the public discourse and seems unlikely to ever become so.
- dhosek 3y ago
  I think it is part of the public discourse, you just may not have encountered it. I recently had cause to recommend some examples of science fiction books that had good world-building that would be useful models for another writer. The two that sprang to mind that I gave the writer, it turned out, were both by female writers (although another non-fiction book I suggested was by a male writer). Part of my onboarding training at my current job was about avoiding unconscious biases by being aware of them. It does feel a little counter-intuitive that women get discriminated against in publishing given that I think the majority of workers in publishing are women (although the gender balance is reversed as you move up the ladder). I’m querying a novel right now and 85% of the agents on my query list are women. Of course, ultimately what matters is the views of the people writing the checks.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
boznz 3y ago
I published my first book last year at 60 years old. It was kind of nice working on carbon-nanotube 2048 bit computer systems and flying saucers for a while before I got back to 8-bit micro-controllers and C.
dash2 3y ago
Penelope Fitzgerald is a great writer. I've read The Blue Flower, Offshore and The Bookshop. The first two are superb. The Blue Flower is set in Jena in the 18th century - a place which was as culturally influential as Palo Alto today. It goes well with Magnificent Rebels, the fun gossipy history of the German romantics who hung out there.
marcofiset 3y ago
We need to normalize “late-blooming”. Not everyone needs to achieve success (whatever that means) before their thirties. It seems like the spotlight will always be on the young blood revolutionizing a particular sector. Most entrepreneurs don’t reach success, or even launch businesses, before being well into their thirties and forties.

49 points by lermontov 3y ago

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.

HenryOliver87 3y ago
What's interesting about PF, of course, is that she just didn't do very much writing earlier on. Glad to hear you have made some progress!
- dhosek 3y ago
  But she did. From the article: > The other answer given is that she wasn’t, in fact, such a late starter. Critics point to her childhood stories, anonymous reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, her probable contributions to Desmond’s history of the Irish Guards, and the literary magazine she and Desmond ran together when the children were little. There were also four short stories she wrote earlier in life: two as a young child, two in the 1950s when she was a mother. (Fitzgerald wrote very few short stories overall.) I would guess that were I to die today, there would be very little evidence that I wrote anything before 2014.
  - soneca 3y ago
    I wouldn’t consider that much writing over 30 years (from 15 to 45 yo). Fiction as just 4 short stories, being 2 as a child. I’d would say that’s very little writing before your first novel.
breck 3y ago
> 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. "Before you can write the book, you have to be the book."
- hi-v-rocknroll 3y ago
  The greatest concentration of interesting folks are the elderly on the fringes of society. If a writer ever wanted to find an ideal biography subject if they weren't the book, there is a demographic of sane, elderly, rough sleepers on each coast of America who have experienced more than the average person can possibly imagine.
  - defrost 3y ago
    The lead actor of Charlie's Country has an extensive biography that goes broader and deeper than many might expect. Just the Dennis Hopper stories alone make a tale worth telling.
    - hi-v-rocknroll 3y ago
      Nice. I think I've heard of that title. I've met a few gems amongst a cavalcade of colorful characters who perhaps could be captured fairly between pen and paper to record an echo of human splendor that should live beyond time. - A paranoid but happy and cynical gentleman with long, scraggly hair like a wizard from the Appalachias who was a military aircraft electrician and an Apple rework tech. Stories spanning every feeling with hilarious exaggerations for emphasis. - A former writer at big name NY newspaper, ex-hippie, and crab fisherman who had quite the life of drugs, women, and was part of it. Body might be shot, but a mind sharper than people who are 30 now without hyperbole. Knows where, when, and who of the cool spots of then and now. - You'd swear he was dangerous or black Santa Claus. Nope, sweetest and coolest guy in the world. Picking cotton, keeping out of trouble during times that were turbulent, elevator repair, and teaching.
      - defrost 3y ago
soperj 3y ago
What did you do before fiction? Is it worth it monetarily? or did you have to change a lot of things to pursue the dream?

DoreenMichele 3y ago

The article indicates that she likely ghostwrote a piece published under her husband's name during the period when many feel she "wasn't writing." I am reminded of the plot for the biopic Collette about a French writer whose initial success was from works published under her husband's name. In the biopic Out of Africa, Karen Blixen is portrayed as learning to tell stories orally to her nieces and later her guests. The man who later becomes her lover gifts her a pen and tells her both "we pay our storytellers here" and "write them down sometime." Blixen was a socialite who was able to access family money by marrying her "lover's brother." When they divorced, she was sterile from syphilis contracted from her unfaithful husband who slept around casually and probably couldn't use marriage and family inheritance a second time as a means to support herself. She also published some of her works under a male name. And I read a piece called Homme de Plume on Jezebel that told the story of a woman writer submitting her work to publishers under a male name and getting much more positive feedback for the exact same manuscript. So gender discrimination is certainly real, but I'm a woman and I don't see getting a sex change operation to fix my issues. Some women downplay their gender by using initials, like JK Rowling. But the thing that interests me is the pieces I might control in some way on my end. Both Penelope Fitzgerald and Karen Blixen appear to have had no ambition initially. They both appear to have been content to try to make life work financially by being wives, the role society expected of them, and it seems likely they only sought to develop a career as paid writers when it became clear they couldn't make life work via that means. I think women get generally inculcated from birth with the idea that a "successful" woman living The Good Life is a woman who married well and had kids and put her husband's career and children's welfare first. Career women tend to get vilified as bad mothers and seem to divorce frequently, possibly because if a woman has sufficient income she doesn't need to try to make a bad marriage work. So I think women tend to lack mental models men seem to be inculcated with and this seems to be a separate issue from the much more readily recognized issue of gender discrimination. No clue how to fix it. It doesn't seem to be part of the public discourse and seems unlikely to ever become so.

dhosek 3y ago
I think it is part of the public discourse, you just may not have encountered it. I recently had cause to recommend some examples of science fiction books that had good world-building that would be useful models for another writer. The two that sprang to mind that I gave the writer, it turned out, were both by female writers (although another non-fiction book I suggested was by a male writer). Part of my onboarding training at my current job was about avoiding unconscious biases by being aware of them. It does feel a little counter-intuitive that women get discriminated against in publishing given that I think the majority of workers in publishing are women (although the gender balance is reversed as you move up the ladder). I’m querying a novel right now and 85% of the agents on my query list are women. Of course, ultimately what matters is the views of the people writing the checks.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

boznz 3y ago

I published my first book last year at 60 years old. It was kind of nice working on carbon-nanotube 2048 bit computer systems and flying saucers for a while before I got back to 8-bit micro-controllers and C.

dash2 3y ago

Penelope Fitzgerald is a great writer. I've read The Blue Flower, Offshore and The Bookshop. The first two are superb. The Blue Flower is set in Jena in the 18th century - a place which was as culturally influential as Palo Alto today. It goes well with Magnificent Rebels, the fun gossipy history of the German romantics who hung out there.

marcofiset 3y ago

We need to normalize “late-blooming”. Not everyone needs to achieve success (whatever that means) before their thirties. It seems like the spotlight will always be on the young blood revolutionizing a particular sector. Most entrepreneurs don’t reach success, or even launch businesses, before being well into their thirties and forties.