Ten Years

When I finished my MFA, my thesis advisor said that if I gave myself ten years, I could get established as a writer. In the eight years since then, I have often thought about that time period. When I was twenty-five, I wanted everything to happen immediately. In fact, I felt like I was already behind. But then I recalled that ten-year window, a long horizon stretched out in front of me, and I was consoled.

Is it coincidence that writer John Baker commends this same ten-year apprenticeship?

When I was young I read somewhere - don’t remember who said it any more - that if you want to be a writer, you should write. You should sit down and write for ten years and at the end of that time you’ll be a writer.

So that’s what I did. That was my way. I thought it was good advice. I still believe it to be good advice. But these days, if I say that to someone, I have to qualify it by stressing that one should also read. Read, read, read.

Ten years gives you time to write hundreds of thousands of words, submit stories and query letters, find fellow writers to critique your work, and read shelves full of books. It also gives you time to grow, to observe the world and your own history with a writer's sensibility. Time to find your material.

Since I started writing in my twenties, the end of my ten-year apprenticeship will land me in my mid-thirties. And I was intrigued to read Jane Smiley's theory in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel that the thirties often mark a significant shift for writers:

For some authors, the desire to write and the interest in character come first, and the product is some short stories; after a while, understanding the implications of a larger picture--a longer time frame or a larger group of characters--is inspiring, and a novel is begun. This may happen at about the time the writer is thirty, a good age for integrating what you have learned in childhood and youth. If we look at our list of authors, we can see that those who were writing in their twenties, whether successful or unsuccessful, often reconceived their work at about age thirty. Dickens was hugely popular and successful with The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and other episodic novels of his twenties, but when he began Martin Chuzzlewit at thirty, he took up his first overarching theme, that of selfishness, to give unity to both his writing and his social theories.

I am definitely noticing this shift in my own work. I am embarking on my first novel after writing many short stories, and I am revisiting my past more deliberately than ever before. I have also learned much about myself, often in the struggle to get my writing done, and I don't think I could have written this particular book two years ago.

I'm grateful that my thesis advisor made that ten-year prophecy. More than anything, her words have given me permission to take my time, and be patient with myself as I learn the craft.