How Old Is Too Old to Be a Writer?

In the first semester of my senior year in high school my English teacher, Opie Oles, taught me how to write a sentence. She was correcting a habit I had developed which was placing periods and capitals willy-nilly on the page. This morphed a year later into a B-grade received on my first English paper as a freshman at the University of Michigan. The instructor said the paper deserved an A, but my spelling deserved an F, so he split the difference generously in my favor.

(It's Never Too Late: On Becoming a Writer at 50.)

Writing for me began with a narrow scope, just a way to explain myself to a select audience for a purpose. A letter I wrote home to my mother during my sophomore year was published in the Warren Avenue Community news serving the Detroit far east side. For my mother, who was an acting guest editor, it was a column she did not have to write. Both mother and son were proud.

My first published work on a national scale appeared in the Student American Medical Association Journal in 1964. I was 29 then and serving as chief medical officer at the Armed Forces Examining Station in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This paper was about careless communication in medicine and the trouble it could cause. The paper as written was turned down, but the editors, with my permission, rewrote it and published it as a brief letter to the editor. They paid me 35 dollars. This followed over the next several decades with hundreds of articles, both invited and peer reviewed, published in medical literature. The money for the unintended editorial was the only money I received for contributing to a medical periodical. Oh, and I did receive a few hundred dollars for cartoons published by the Saturday Evening Post in the 70s.

Seriously at work in medicine I authored or co-authored three medical textbooks and contributed chapters to several others. Dealing with these publishers and editors introduced me to the best and the worst a person could expect from flirting with the big time. Textbook writing is arduous and demanding, but has its rewards, though not necessarily monetary. By the time my last medical book was written I was in my 60s and looking forward to new opportunities. In medicine this involved educational and instructional projects that included the internet and graphics leading to telemedicine for both patient management and training, writing but a different kind.

Contemplating the really old age ushered in by the 80s, I thought let’s have some fun. I wrote a 450-page book filled with stories transferred into a book by a publisher offering seniors a way to share memories with their family. Effort required by the writer involved becoming comfortable with the Word program, careful proofreading (get some help if you can), and pressing “submit.” It costs under 100 dollars for a finished book and additional books can be purchased for about 30 dollars each. Not a bad deal.

With still more to share and enjoyment looking back, I authored a book about the importance of youth having one or more meaningful jobs in their years between 10 and 20, the second decade, and that was the name of the book. It earned a sticker for the cover as a finalist in the nonfiction category—some encouragement.

Now near the mid-80s I thought it would really be a hoot to write a “Tom Clancy” type book. Choosing as a model “Jack Armstrong,” the fictional radio hero popular from the 30s to the 50s, my hero, Adam Grant, provided the heroics for three self-published thrillers. This exercise taught several important lessons: have a good editor (I found a superb one with The Second Decade and we continue collaboration), be sure you are having fun because you will not make any money, the mechanics of creating a book both print and digital have been well worked out, and marketing is a steep uphill climb that is a tough go.

Finally in the very old category over 85 (I am 89) the answer to the question “how old is too old?” is no longer a number but a measure of competence. It comes when you have nothing to say.

This thought first visited me three years ago when it struck me that my colleague Alan Scott, the man who brought us Botox and asked nothing in return, had a great story but there were only a few of us left who were there at the beginning. Who but us would be able to tell this story—but we were old. The catch is we had to be because his Botox story started nearly 60 years ago when we were in our 30s. We would soon be in our 90s if we made it. The story not only needed to be written by an old person, that person had to be me or someone who was around at the time and willing to undertake the task. I did not know of anyone else.

I called Alan Scott and outlined my plan for writing the book. He liked the idea and agreed to tell me all he could remember. His exact words were, “Let’s see what happens.” After this, at the urging of my editor, I contacted Indiana University Press who agreed to publish a book about Alan Scott, the developer of Botox. This resulted in Death to Beauty, a work published in the 90th year of its author writing about a man who told his story in his 90th year answers partially to the question, “how old is too old?” — “…depending on the individual, somewhere north of 90.”

Check out Eugene M. Helveston's Death to Beauty here:

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