Author in Progress
When Megan Tudehope decided, aged 40, to write her first novel, she started reading and watching anything and everything that might teach her how, and she noticed a common theme: people talking about how they’d wanted to be authors their whole lives, and had been writing since childhood; who had written their first novels in their 20s, if not their teens. Tudehope, who grew up convinced she couldn’t draw or paint and therefore wasn’t a creative person, never thought to write a novel in her 20s—but she did have an idea for one.
“I had read something in a newspaper and it had triggered an idea… it really stuck with me,” she says. It was a great idea, but she’d never use it; she wasn’t that kind of writer. Tudehope was so sure of this that she didn’t even keep her idea a secret; now she’s a little apprehensive at the thought of how many people she might have told.
“For some reason I had this narrative about myself that I wasn’t a creative person, that I was better at writing serious stuff,” she says. Perhaps it had something to do with winning a place at a writing camp as a kid, being “the youngest by far,” and feeling so overwhelmed that she didn’t write a word the whole time. She also had an idea that “serious” writing and “creative” writing were somehow mutually exclusive; she was good at the former, this ruled out the latter.
“I studied to be a journalist and then worked in politics and corporate communications and wrote about very serious things and, often, very boring things,” she says. Tudehope was good at it, but she struggled with the fact that what she did for a living didn’t always align with her values. And then she hit “mid-life” and realized that, “creative” or not, deep down she’d always wanted to write the novel—and if she didn’t try now, she likely never would. “I just had this realization,” she says. “I didn’t want to get to the end of my life regretting not giving this a go. And I thought about all the other things I spent my time on that were less valuable.”
Writing a novel was a daunting prospect, especially given all those stories about being born a writer and starting young. “I had to get over this feeling I’d missed the boat,” she says. “I had this real sense of: if I was really going to be any good at this, surely I would have pursued it earlier in my life, therefore maybe I don’t have any real natural talent.” Tudehope started to seek out stories of writers who came to their craft later in life—“because I felt like I needed to see people like me who’d pissed away their 20s and spent their 30s with their kids, and now were trying to do it”—stories that, even when she sought them out, were hard to find.
Later, I try, too. I type: “authors who started writing fiction in their 40s” into a search engine. An article titled “10 Hugely Successful Authors Who Got Their Start Later in Life” tells me Toni Morrison, Mark Twain, Marcel Proust, and Henry Miller all first published novels in their 40s. But it doesn’t say when they started writing (Twain wrote throughout his teens, and Miller wrote his first novel when he was 30) or what they did before (Morrison was an editor after graduating from university, and Proust founded a literary review in his 20s).
Another list—11 Writers Who Started Late—highlights some previous professions of famous authors: paint factory manager, oil company executive, lawyer, etc. It’s here I learn that Laura Ingalls Wilder started writing in her 40s but—and I appreciate this detail—didn’t have her first book published for another 20 years. Of course, only published writers make these lists. And generally speaking, only published authors’ stories end up being told. There’s an unwritten rule: Wait until a book is published before telling the story of the work or its author; if the book isn’t published—if there’s no public debut, public success—the story’s not worth telling. It’s a rule I’m clearly willing to break. The fact you’re reading such a story means an editor has broken the rule too.
But does the absence of publication make this story any less legitimate? Isn’t the tale of attempting something new and difficult for the first time, of taking a risk, of persevering in the face of uncertainty, worth telling even if it doesn’t end in a book deal?
Tudehope wrote when she could. “At first it went pretty slowly, because my kids were really little,” she says. “I thought, the only time I’m really going to get to do this is in the morning, [so] I’d get up at 5 a.m.—but I had a 3-year-old son… Sometimes I would only get 20 minutes; I’d bash out two paragraphs in 20 minutes, and that was all I got.” Occasionally she’d have until 6 a.m., but that was about the best she could hope for.
The secret to Tudehope’s work is discipline and perseverance. “Things went very, very slowly, but I just had this dogged determination: Don’t worry about the end product, just get up every day and do something; be disciplined in the process, and the outcome will take care of itself,” she says. “And two and a half years later, I’m still telling myself that when the alarm goes off at 5.”
When she started, Tudehope says, she had no idea what she was doing. “I got to 30,000 words and then realised I was not writing a novel at all, I was just writing a series of scenes that didn’t connect to each other and had no character or story arcs, so I went back, after 30,000 words, and chucked probably 60% of it out and started again.”
She got another rude shock when she finished her first draft. “I thought, ‘Excellent, it’s just about editing this then I’m done’—but the editing process is much more complex than I understood.” More than a year later, she’s up to her sixth draft, which she’s workshopping in a writing course.
“The premise is the same, the beginning is the same, the ending is the same, but the story in the middle is really evolving, and it’s getting better and better and better as I learn,” she says. There are moments where she says she can see her skill and understanding have gone up a level, moments where she seems to have plateaued, and moments where she’s struck by a pang of fear because there’s so much, still, to learn. It’s scary and it’s difficult, but she can see herself becoming a better writer. “It’s a skill and craft I have to learn, through the discipline of getting up and doing it every day. It’s less about how much time I get each day. It’s the discipline of just getting up and doing it.”
One benefit of having taken 20-odd years to start working on her idea is that Tudehope has another 20 years of living under her belt. Writing characters that become more and more layered as they move through life, who are “good people” and “bad people” at the same time, is something she’s not sure she could have done in her 20s.
And while she may not have spent those years writing fiction, she has spent them writing. Tudehope started out as a print journalist, then moved into marketing and communication, working for public and private organizations of varying sizes as she climbed the corporate ladder. Her professional life has taught her much that aids in her personal pursuit—how to edit her work, how to sharpen her sentences, how to achieve clarity and economy. She’s also written a lot of speeches. “That idea of pace and dialogue, and learning how to write how people speak… that’s definitely helped,” she says. If it weren’t for her career before she tried writing the book, she says, she can imagine having a much more complicated style and mistakenly believing that to be “good writing.”
One major difference has been the experience of having people read her work. “There’s a big difference between sending off a press release for someone to review and pressing ‘send’ for the very first time ever to share your novel with someone else,” she notes, describing the latter as a “gut-wrenching” feeling. As part of the workshopping process Tudehope is undergoing now, she’s had to share her synopsis and her first 5,000 words with a peer. “I didn’t get great feedback on the synopsis,” she says. “I was feeling a bit down… Should I start a new project? Was this something I should just file away as a learning process?
“Then I submitted my first 5,000 words, and I got great feedback from the tutor. That really buoyed me to keep going,” she says. “At same time, I don’t know if I can continue to go through this cycle being so affected by external feedback… I have to be able to keep going regardless of what the feedback is, and just have a real sense of confidence in my own work.”
Even so, when she does catch herself feeling confident, part of her still wonders if she’s like one of the contestants in the early seasons of The Voice or Australia’s Got Talent, who never had a chance, who were cast because they thought they were amazing, as a kind of cruel joke. She says, “There’s part of me that’s always wondering… Am I really good at this? Can I be good at this? Or am I just lacking the self-awareness to know that this isn’t something that I should be doing? I don’t have that lack of confidence at work.”
Very occasionally Tudehope lets herself entertain the “ultimate dream” of quitting her job and spending all her time writing novels—but mostly she’s a realist. “That is just so far away from where I am now I can’t focus on that,” she says. “At the moment, my focus is really on the discipline of just getting up and doing it and being immersed in the process.” If she doesn’t enjoy that, she reasons, she’s kidding herself that she wants to do this for a living. “[If,] even when it’s a bit torturous, I’m still enjoying it, then maybe one day I could have a life where I quit my job and do this every day,” she says. “It’s funny, because before I started, I wished I’d done it earlier; now I’ve started, I don’t actually think about that.
“I’m focusing so much on the process [that] the timeframes actually don’t matter so much anymore. I’m not thinking about getting to this particular point by a particular age or time in my life anymore. It’s just: the alarm goes off, I lay in bed for a minute, and then I tell myself, ‘Get out of bed, Megan.’”
Whatever happens with the final manuscript, Tudehope says she won’t regret the time spent writing it. She recalls Ash Barty talking about how winning Wimbledon isn’t her ultimate goal, because that’s outside of her control. Instead, her focus is on what she can control: her mindset, her training regime, and her day-to-day commitment.
Similarly, all the effort in the world might not result in Tudehope’s book being published. “There’s so much of that that involves luck: what’s happening in the market at the moment, what’s happening in trends in publishing,” she says. Tudehope knows she can’t control those things. What she can do is create a novel that “makes sense from start to finish,” that she’s proud of, that she loves. “I’ll be proud of finishing this book whether it gets published or not, because it involves a level of discipline I didn’t know I was capable of. Along with ‘not creative,’ ‘un-disciplined’ was another self-descriptor I’ve repeated over the years,” she says. “Writing this book has taught me that I am both creative and disciplined.”
I noted earlier that the writers we hear about tend to be those whose books are a “success.” They are liked by lots of people, or they are liked by “the right” people. Whether or not Tudehope’s novel will be one of them—and whether or not it’s even published—remains to be seen.
But being published and selling a certain number of copies can be just as much a measure of luck as of talent. Perhaps, in narrowing our attention to stories of “success,” in narrowing our definition of success, we’re missing out. Surely creating a convincing world with convincing characters and a compelling story when you have a husband, two children, and a full-time job—not to mention discovering you are capable of discipline and creativity—is a story that’s worth telling, in and of itself.
Editor’s Note: “Author in Progress” is based on an interview Emma Wilkins conducted in early 2023 for an article titled “Office workers by day, artists by night.”
Tudehope was one of four friends she interviewed for the piece, Wilkins was only able to use a fraction of the conversation in the article, so she turned what would have been left on the cutting-room floor into a stand-alone article. It took her more than a year to find a home for it. “Some of my favourite pieces seem hardest to place,” Wilkins says. “In this case it was fitting, since one of the themes of the piece is our fascination with people once—and only once—they meet a very particular, very narrow definition of success.”
EMMA WILKINS is a Tasmanian journalist whose freelance work has been published by news outlets, print magazines, and literary journals in Australia and beyond. She has a particular interest in relationships, literature, culture, ethics and belief. From short, silly reflections on cultural norms to long philosophical essays, you never know what she’s going to write next, or where it will be published. Neither does she.
VIOLA LEE graduated from NYU with an MFA in Poetry. Her book Lightening after the Echo was published by Another New Calligraphy. She published in Bellevue Literary Review, Mississippi Review, Barrow Street, and Another Chicago Magazine. She lives in Chicago with her husband, son and daughter.
