“Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves – that’s the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives – experiences so great and moving that it doesn’t seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories – each time in a new disguise – maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

Due to my own writing struggles the last decade or so, I’m been thinking a great deal about the impact of age and aging on fiction writing. Not on levels of success (seeing as how I’ve had little) but on the process and the output itself. The youthful mind of a person’s 20s is often unstable and not fully formed, yet has been responsible for some of the greatest prose throughout history. For me, my mind in my 20s was constantly exploding with ideas – I’d carry a pen and paper everywhere to keep track of them all. It was as if they were coming from outside me and I was just a receiver. The muse, or whatever you want to call it, was working overtime. From my mid 30s until now the gushing faucet became a dripping one. It never fully stopped, and the ideas that do come are usually decent, but few and far between.

The Lost Generation was perhaps unique owing to the sheer horrors the world had never seen before as produced by WWI, but as they’re my favorite generation of writers, I naturally turn to them for examples. Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises changed everything, and they could only have been produced by men in their 20s. The stories could have been written later, and they likely would have been much more polished and tight, but they’d never have the same impact, and certainly wouldn’t have been “better.” Youth, all youth, is about seeking, it always has been. However, like everything else, the internet interrupted this normally deep search, giving youth constant distractions and tiny hits of dopamine whenever they want. Without those, youth had to either go deeper for meaning, or accept the prevailing “wisdom” lock, stock, and barrel. Creatives – god bless them – have never accepted what they were told to believe just because they were told to believe it.

And now? Now we have the horrors of AI, unleashed on the creative world. How many untold people are now using it to convince themselves they’ve created something, scratching that deep itch, getting that dopamine, but never, ever getting the satisfaction and meaning that can only come by finishing a project born from one’s own mind after hours and hours of work.

But I digress.

Great writing can obviously happen at any age, but I’d be curious to see a discussion of what have been named the greatest novels/short stories in human history, and breaking those down by the ages of the authors. Is it added responsibilities that get in the way? Is it the pressures of society? I, for one, would desperately love to go back to the time when I never once thought about agents, editors and critics while I’m writing, simply writing to write, doing my best, rather than worrying that something might be terribly misinterpreted by people who come in with their own agendas. (Which has happened).

Hemingway won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea. It’s an incredible, technical masterpiece, but for me nothing beats his early work, just like Fitzgerald and most writers. Perhaps that’s a fault of my own, a refusal to give up my own youthful yearnings, or maybe it’s because at 42 I think I should be much better than I am. Regardless, it’s a fascinating question.

For other writers out there, how have you found age has impacted your writing? For readers, do you tend to enjoy work done by younger writers?