Career paths

You've reached a mid-life crisis - you've been dabbling with writing (perhaps with some success, maybe you've been published already) for years and want to go to the next level. Maybe your kids have grown and left, you've come into some money, you've a long-term illness, or you've unexpectedly become unemployed. What are the options?

It's a question that prose writers more so than poets ask. Prose needs more of a full time commitment than poetry does, and some people who already earn money writing prose (journalists, technical writers, translators, etc) can earn money writing while pursuing their dream. Also I think women more so than men follow this delayed career path, their lives disrupted more by parenthood.

You could take early retirement, buy a cottage in the South of France, Walden, or even move to Tahiti, but most of us have to compromise a little.

A Masters Degree (MFA, MLit, MA)

Creative Writing's a competitive hobby nowadays, verging on a profession. Young budding writers who want to work within academia have to be prepared to move often, and go on short-term contracts. You probably don't want to compete on that level. Look upon your age as an advantage. There's more to writing success than merely writing - you'll have to fill in forms, jump through hoops, meet deadlines, balance competing needs, thoroughly research the market, have the money to buy the right books, be self-critical, etc. Perhaps you won't have as much spare time as some of your class-mates, but you'll have more life-experiences and perhaps you'll be better able to exploit your opportunities.

If you missed the chance to do a full time Masters the first time round, don't worry - it's never too late. In "The Guardian" (8 May 2009) Professor Russell Celyn Jones said that "The MA programme I run at Birkbeck, University of London, attracts people of all ages from around the world and with a wide range of life experience. These doctors, journalists, police, actors and lawyers are clear-eyed about their expectations: they want to pursue a private passion communally for a year."

It's not so much the academic surroundings that attract late-comers -

• You may appreciate the discipline, the lack of distraction, the easy availability of help.
• Unless you show you're serious about writing, your family won't take you seriously and won't give you space.
• A Masters is a way to validate your skills - even if it doesn't help you write better, the certificate at the end will open doors.
• It will show the grandchildren that you're not over the hill yet.

You might be able to take a year off work (a BBC TV reporter did this so that he could do a Masters in creative writing) but of course, you needn't go full time - nowadays many Masters courses welcome mature students, waiving qualification requirements, and offering low-residency, 2 year part-time options with distance learning components, variable speeds, and a choice of terms when you can start. Courses nowadays include sessions on market awareness and the Publishing trade, and assessed material is likely to include a dissertation folio (aka "creative thesis") which may be in poetry or prose, so you needn't take a break from your usual writing and submitting. But do these courses work?

• Venessa Gebbie was accepted to do an MPhil in Writing, but changed her mind after finding out more about the course (having already paid a deposit).
• Tania Hershman spent ten years working as a science and technology journalist before enrolling on the MA at Bath Spa, UK. Her project went on to be published.
• Chris Hamilton Emery started a course at UEA, then changed his mind.

So yes, it can work, but it's risky. See the Poets & Writers page for more US information. The UK is catching up fast with the USA. Suddenly it's become normal for 30% of the bios in a magazine like Rialto to mention Creative Writing degrees. England's UEA isn't quite the Iowa workshop, but it's been around since 1970 - see their Autumn syllabus. It's produced several "mature" writers.

One-off Help

Rather than commit to a long course which may include lots of material you're not interested in, you can pay for specific help

• Literary Consultants - Publishers' in-house editors rarely have time nowadays to discover and nurture talent. Meanwhile, thanks to Creative Writing courses, more and more authors are producing near-publishable books. How can they be helped? Agents are more publisher-orientated, and in any case are unlikely to deal with stories and poems, which is why "literary consultants" (aka "manuscript assessment services") are on the increase. Depending on the quality of the work they may recommend it to an agent or publisher, suggest a few tweaks, or splatter the first page or 2 with comments and have a long, frank discussion with the author. Even if you find a reputable company, you won't know beforehand how useful their comments will be, but even their help with the all-important first few paragraphs may make all the difference. In an advert I recently read, "Established, acclaimed authors offer aspiring writers ten hours of consultation time, usually spread out over a year. In between, the mentor reads the work for a further ten hours" for 2600 pounds.
• Mentoring - The UK's Faber and Faber is the latest organisation to nurture individual talent. It's a growth area. The New Writing Partnership's Escalator scheme also works that way. Writers value such attention albeit briefly at residential courses and on Masters courses. Being under someone's wing for several months is what most budding writers want, especially if there's guaranteed publication at the end.

The common factor here is the 1-on-1 contact, something lost during the rise of big business and workshops. Another is the expense. Consultancy and mentoring don't come cheap - mentoring is about $40/hour, and 1,000 words cost at least $10 to be evaluated. Regional Arts Boards can sometimes help with funding or at least offer recommendations.

Roll your own

If you have the self-discipline you could plan a year-long programme tailored to your own needs. Creative writing syllabuses are online to give you ideas. Festivals, readings, short residential workshops, private study, and competition deadlines can be time-tabled into a year of activity. Holidays can be integrated into the scheme too.

In the UK, Arvon weeks are frequently mentioned as a life-changing experience. Immersion for a week in a writing environment helps people to start thinking of themselves as "writers".

Poets & Writers have a Literary Events Calendar (a nationwide calendar of readings, workshops, and other literary events) and a page about Writers Conferences, Colonies, and Workshops page showing some US options.

Online groups can help. Venessa Gebbie is one of many writers who had a middle-age surge. She said "I spent eighteen months on and off working in an online writing group ... That was akin to an apprenticeship." But you need your wits about you if you're going to benefit from such locations. Older people might have an advantage in this respect.

Fanning out

Rather than focus on your writing, you may want to diversify, or focus on marketing. The traditional career path (publication in reputable magazines leading to pamphlet then book publication, then inclusion in anthologies) is still viable but it's so slow that you'll have competition not only from your contemporaries, but from those who started later and took faster routes - performances, festivals, interning, reviewing, letters to editors, blogging, videos, teaching, scholarships, fellowship, cornering the market on a particular topic, consultancy, conferencing, niche-anthologies, local radio, residencies etc. Arts administrators seem to do well. Flexibility and risk-taking are required to exploit these options. Such an approach is hard to combine with a conventional 9-5 job or parenthood. Describing the US situation, Sam Hamill wrote that "A typical poet in North America finds it necessary to relocate every year for the first few years after college, and every several years for a couple of decades after that. ... The typical poet teaches".

As an example of how even a reputable poet has to survive, consider Lavania Greenlaw. Her CV reads like a career guidance manual - 1990: Eric Gregory Award; 1995: Science Museum residency. Arts Council Writers Award, and British Council Fellow; 1997: Wingate Scholarship; 2000: three-year fellowship by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, also reader-in-residence at the Royal Festival Hall; 2003: Cholmondeley Award. Jobs include arts administrator, freelance writer, reviewer and radio broadcaster, teaching on a Creative Writing MA Programme and working on the Tate and Hayward Gallery education programmes.

Alternative Approaches

• At the age of 92 Toyo Shibatashe gave up dancing because of a bad back, and started writing poetry. At 98, she'd sold 40,000 copies of her poetry book in Japan.
• Become a celeb first, then publish later - see Viggo Mortenson
• Become a writer of any kind first - see Prue Leith (first novel at 55)
• Make explicit use of your profession - either for content or as a PR opportunity
• Some competitions have a lower-age limit of 50 or so. Make the most of them. Grey Hen is one of a number of organisations for older writers.
• See Career in poetry (from TextEtc)
• See Mapping Poetic Emergence 1.0