Category: Musings (Page 9 of 9)

50 years-old may be a good age for a mid-life crisis but it is also the perfect age to publish a novel designed to become a best-seller, according to a study of best-selling novels and their authors over the past half-century. The average age of writers in the year that their novels topped the hardback fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List during the half-century from 1955–2004 was 50.5 years — according to a study conducted by Lulu (www.lulu.com). Below is a graph of the average age of bestselling authors over the last 50 years.

A couple of great quotes from The Master’s Artist:

Henri Nouwen writes this in Reflections on Theological Education: “Writing is a process by which we discover what lives in us. The writing itself reveals what is alive. The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware of before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know.”

And a quote on writing to process and understand from A River Runs Through It.

“Later, when you’re ready, tell the story of our family. Perhaps then you’ll understand what happened.”