Why Older Writers Aren't Necessarily Better ...

Yes, writing is a lifetime’s vocation. Which is why a 45-year-old writer is no more “superior” to a 25-year-old, than 45 years of life are “superior” to 25. The common mistake is to assume that at the later age you have all that you did at the earlier, plus 20 years experience. The truth is, people forget. At 20 it seems scarcely conceivable that we were once six years old — a child is a stranger — and similarly, at 40 the young person is a stranger. His or her way of thinking and feeling is irretrievably lost — it shows in the clash of the generations, and it shows in the writing. “Experience” is not a commodity that keeps increasing quantitatively; it only keeps changing qualitatively; and so, incredible though it may seem, the 25-year-old writer possesses as many passionately felt thoughts, and as many means of expressing them, as he or she ever will. Looked at another way, it is worth noting that there comes an age beyond which one word fits all: the word is “adult”, and if you are not one by 25, you probably won’t be one by 75.

Aditya Sudarshan in The Hindu has some interesting things to say about age and the fiction writer - a topic which we've visited on this blog before ...

Green Teens?

Should teen writers be rushed into print? Imogen Russell Williams on The Guardian blog reckons that although :

...the best writing by children and teenagers can be astonishingly poignant, hilarious, and indeed helpful.

and they should certainly be enouraged, :

In your early teens, you're not necessarily aware of how derivative your literary outpourings are, and the extent to which your reading shapes your writing; and you may not yet be sufficiently master of your own voice ...

One young writer she holds up as an example is Nancy Yi Fan, author of the Swordbird series (with 2 novels under her belt at 15) :

... obviously a very talented teenage writer, but her often infelicitous phrasing ... and the heavy-handedness of her good v evil take on her avian universe suggests that the publisher would have done better to wait for her to mature a little more before rushing her into print.

She also mentions Daisy Ashford wrote The Young Visiters when she was just 9 years old in 1919 (when the novel was published many years later, it went through 18 times in its first year alone) and "the most famous piece of published writing by a young author", Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl.

(She might also have included Christopher Paolini, author of the Brisingr series who is enjoying a great deal of commercial success.)

But with all these younger writers, you find yourself wondering just how they will judge their earlier work when they do reach maturity. Will it be with great pride or toe-curling embarrassment?

Anyway, if you are a teen who wants to write, you might find this list of books compiled Aaron Shepard useful.