DOES AGE MATTER?

by Deborah Elliott-Upton

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Does age matter? I suppose it depends on who is asking and why. If the apple of your eye is underage and you are not, it definitely matters. If you’ve always wanted to be a cop but you’re on the wrong side of the proverbial hill where your responses aren’t as quick as your counterparts in the police academy would be, it matters. If you are a writer, it probably doesn’t matter half as much as some people think it may.

One surprisingly nice segment of the recent Oscars was when David Seidler won Best Original Screenplay for “The King’s Speech.” He said he was the oldest person to win in that category and he hoped his standing as such would be broken soon and often.

I don’t think a story is better if it is written by a young or an older person. If it’s good, it’s good!. It’s the passion for the project that exudes freshness to plots and characters—not the age of the writer.

The question, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?” has always interested me. I know people who are young at 75 and those who are old at 25.

Experiences belong to the young as well as the old. How we take those experiences and turn them into stories belongs to the talent of the author. Do some older people have knowledge I wish I owned? Yes. I wish I knew how it really was to live through a depression or the early 1920s. But, I also wish I had knowledge from younger people, too. I want to know how the younger generation thinks and talks and believes about what’s going on in the world today. I’d also like to be a savvy as they are with the ever-evolving technology they embrace so readily.

H. P. Lovecraft wrote long poems by the time he was five years old.

Susan Boyle began her singing career on the stage of “Britain’s Got Talent” at age 48.

Marjorie Fleming was a published poet at her death. She was 8 years old.

Peter Mark Roget was forced to retire as a member of London’s esteemed scientists group, the Royal Society, to make room for new, younger minds. He did not retire, but changed his work. He had an idea for a book like a dictionary, but one that didn’t define words, but grouped them together in classifications. He was 73 when Roget’s Thesaurus was published and oversaw every update until his death at 90.

Tiger Woods played golf at two.

Alexander Pope, another child prodigy, is the third most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, following Shakespeare and Tennyson.

Julia Child studied at the Cordon Bleu when she was 40. Mastering the Art of French Cooking was rejected many times before being published, a decade later.

Lope de Vega wrote his first play when he was twelve years old.

Madame Curie taught herself to read at 4 in both Russian and French.

Jascha Heifetz was performing public concerts by age 5.

Danny Aiello became an actor at 40.

Mary Wesley wrote two children’s books in her late fifties, but did not receive acclaim until her first novel written at 70, following the death of her husband.

Laura Ingalls Wilder did not publish her first novel until she was in her sixties.

Erma Bombeck wrote her first article at age 37.

Raymond Chandler published his first short story at 45 and first novel at 51.

Does age matter? My answer is no, and I was pleased to hear that David Seidler agrees.

1. Youth and Age (1929) by Alfred Schwarzschild [↩]