Somewhere in my life, I went from feeling too young to do things to too old. The truth is that making the “age” argument is a cop out on both ends of the life spectrum. You can always find ways in which others are more experienced making you, therefore, too young. You can also find others who are reaching your same goals way before in their lives than you are. Every life progresses at its own pace, so there’s no such thing as too old or too young for anything.
Still, it does my heart good to read about others who achieved great success at my age or later. I’m not complaining – my blessings abound. But knowing that Laura Ingalls Wilder, she of Little House fame, published her first book at age 64 gives me hope.
Anyway, here’s something I just learned about Madeleine L’Engle, one of the beloved authors of my childhood. I find this so inspiring! I hope you do too.
L’Engle determined to give up writing on her 40th birthday (November 1958) when she received yet another rejection notice. “With all the hours I spent writing, I was still not pulling my own weight financially.” Soon she discovered both that she could not give it up and that she had continued to work on fiction subconsciously.
On a cross-country camping trip L’Engle first had the idea for her most famous novel, A Wrinkle in Time, which she completed by 1960. It was rejected more than thirty times before she handed it to John C. Farrar it was finally published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1962, the year she turned 44.
