I think it actually started in my late thirties. I started changing psychologically, and it was difficult to translate that into my writing.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I wrote my first book when I was in my late thirties.
I started to write when I was eighteen or nineteen. However, until I was about twenty-three, I didn't take it that seriously.
At 50, I began to know who I was. It was like waking up to myself.
It was failing part of my Ph.D. that led me into novel-writing. By then I was 29, had remarried and had a second baby. It struck me that I'd lost my path in life and I felt frustrated. That's when I started to write.
When I was 21, I got into a motorcycle accident while traveling in Europe and I had to lie around a lot in the aftermath, which was really the first time in my life that I became really focused and inspired to write.
I started writing seriously about 1960, at the fairly advanced age of 30.
When I turned 40, subconsciously, life was a blank sheet. Before, it was disjointed, and I was very displaced and quite mad, but it was a brilliant time. Everyone thinks I must have been unhappy.
I have a very vivid memory of the way my parents spoke, and the 50's that I grew up in are closer to the 20's, I think, than today in many, many ways.
I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.
I began writing seriously in my mid-20s and didn't publish my first book until I was 41.