The Right Age to Write

Have you ever wondered what is the best age to write that book which will make you famous all over the world. Should you write it when you are young and reckless, or should you wait till time has got a chance to work its magic upon you and you have learnt your lessons from the hard task master that time is.

G. B. Shaw famously said  that we learn from history that we learn nothing from history. Yet, history is an important tool to learn some lessons which otherwise we may never learn. So, I decided to have a look at the past to find out how old some famous writers were when they wrote one of their most acclaimed works.

Here is what I did: I found a list of the 100 best books of all time. Then, I reduced the list to 57 after removing books by the same author, epics and  a few others that were written in an entirely different age and time. Finally, I calculated the age at which the books were written.

The average age of the writer when he or she wrote a book that would become a part of the list of the top 100 best books of all time was 42 years and 6 months. How old are you now?

Jokes apart, it seems that most writers were aged somewhere between 30 and 50 when they wrote their best book.  Most of these writers had been writing since a very early age, but it was around 40 that they were able to produce their best work. The information can be represented in a different manner to break down the age of  the writers into age groups of five years.

The age group in which the largest number of writers were able to do their best work was 35-40 years (12 authors). So, if you are between 30 and 50 years, and you are working on a book, chances are this could be your best work and could make your name a household name all over the world.

Statistics are numbers that can be used to define the average, and can act as useful guidelines to define your future actions. They, however, always have outliers. One, therefore, should not allow oneself to be limited by the numbers, as is evident by the inclusion of José Saramago in the list who got into the list because of his book, Blindness, which was published when he was 73.

Let me know what you think of these numbers.

(Image of Typewriter courtesy: wolliballa from sxc.hu)