I’m agreeing with GalleyCat — this New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell is “one of the best pieces about the realities of the writer’s life.” Meaning, it’s one of the few I’ve read that didn’t leave me with a knot in the pit of my stomach. If you’re a writer of a … certain age … I think you’ll get a lot out of it.
On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith. (Let’s just be thankful that Cézanne didn’t have a guidance counsellor in high school who looked at his primitive sketches and told him to try accounting.) Whenever we find a late bloomer, we can’t but wonder how many others like him or her we have thwarted because we prematurely judged their talents. But we also have to acccept that there’s nothing we can do about it. How can we ever know which of the failures will end up blooming?
Did you catch that? Blooming late looks a lot like failure. Gladwell goes on to surmise that the reason late bloomers ultimately succeed is because they have intensive support from those around them; they have at least one person in their intimate circle who believes in them.
Filed under: art, authors, psychology, writing Tagged: | GalleyCat, late bloomers, Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker
You go, Elizabeth! We believe in you!
Thank you! Remember — I’m not failing, I just LOOK like I’m failing!
Of course, the problem is what to do if you don’t have Emile Zola or a doting wife who believes in you. . .
That’s my new slogan–”I’m not a failure, I just look like one.”