There are many paths to becoming a writer. Some writers emerge early, in their twenties or thirties, publish books, and establish a writing career. Others emerge later.

I emerged as a writer later in life.

When I was eight years old, I wanted to be a writer or an artist. I created a newspaper at home. All the news was made-up. The movies were imaginary, the reviews of movies and books, too. I hand-printed articles and drew illustrations. I used to look longingly at the back pages of magazines where I found ads for writing schools by correspondence, imagining I would enroll in one someday.

In college, I took literature and history classes and wrote poetry. The most memorable class was taught by the poet Donald Hall.

However, I decided being a writer wasn’t practical. I needed to earn a living and wanted to find a field in which I could help people. So I went to law school. As a lawyer, I was always writing—legal briefs, opening and closing statements, motions—but I realized I wasn’t doing the kind of writing I wanted.

I did creative work on the side. There wasn’t much time; law was encompassing. Everywhere I looked while practicing law, I saw fractured lives and stories that needed telling. When I was a public defender in Colorado, as I waited in court for the bailiff to call my cases, I jotted impressions of clients, the judge, the courtroom. I stayed late at the office, typing stories and poems.

Creative writing was a secret pleasure that fueled me during the long days of practicing law.

One day, I gathered my courage and sent a few poems to my former professor, Donald Hall. He generously responded and was encouraging.  

In my thirties, I went to a writing conference for the first time. My family and I were living in Denver. The workshop instructor, Kathleen Spivak, told me that my poems sounded like stories. She suggested I take a fiction writing class at the University of Denver. “You should study with a teacher,” she said. “You’ll grow faster as a writer that way.” She gave me the name of someone to contact.

He was on sabbatical but another professor allowed me to enroll as a special student in graduate writing classes. I was the oldest student by far and had the least experience in creative writing.

I took one class a semester. The more I wrote and learned about writing, the more I wanted to pursue it.

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Writing is a commitment and, in a sense, a relationship. A relationship between the writer and the words on the page. You have to be open to the relationship, ready to make a commitment to write and honor that commitment on good days and bad.

Muriel Spark said: “Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.”

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I began to write fiction seriously in my forties. I was the mother of three children by then. My family and I moved to Nashville for my husband’s work. There was no MFA program in Nashville at the time. I stepped back from law and wrote when I could—mornings, waiting in the carpool line, nights after the children went to sleep. Some days, I felt as if I had been stealing time to write. I joined a writers group, went to another writing conference, and submitted work to literary journals. I received a flurry of rejections. An editor of a literary journal accepted a story. I was thrilled.

My first book, Second Language, a collection of short stories, was published when I was in my fifties.

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I don’t know first-hand the benefits of emerging early as a writer, but I can imagine some. Emerging early can give a writer confidence, affirmation, a career path. A young writer, if lucky, has the luxury of lots of time ahead to write, revise, deal with rejections, and publish books.

Emerging later as a writer brings its own rewards and can give confidence, affirmation, and even a career path.  

However, an older writer has limited time ahead. Time is essential for writing. The unconscious needs time to do its work.

An older writer brings together everything he or she has studied and thought, every trauma and experience, and pours this into writing. The older writer’s perspective is different from a younger writer’s perspective, and this enriches the writing, too.

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In my earlier career as a public defender, I represented clients charged with crimes. Being a trial lawyer is a little like writing fiction. You don’t make up facts as a lawyer, but you put a spin on the facts and tell a story to a jury.

My clients experienced difficult emotions and adverse circumstances. Working with them helped me understand a diverse group of people and emotions. I’ve tried to capture these emotions in my writing and also my own emotions. My new book, Artifacts and Other Stories, is about the joys and limitations of love, the coming together and breaking apart of relationships. The stories explore desire, love, betrayal, divorce, aging, illness, loss, and fresh starts. Some of the characters are lawyers. The profession suited these characters and deepened the stories.

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On Bittersweet Place, my novel, tells the story of a young woman who flees the Ukraine with her family and settles in Chicago during the Jazz Age of the 1920s. The book follows the narrator from the time she is ten to sixteen. When I wrote the novel, my childhood and adolescence were many decades ago. I was able to view childhood and adolescence with clarity and distance.

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Writing doesn’t require physical strength or agility. Writers aren’t football players or ballerinas or gymnasts. You can write at any age as long as you are mentally intact.

Each of my books feels like a triumph, a hard-won gift.

“Getting published later in life is a kind of resistance,” John Benditt said.

Resistance to aging, ageism, and stagnation.

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I have fulfilled a childhood wish and pleasure by becoming a writer. If I had known when I created a newspaper at home or when I was a student in the fiction writing classes at the university that I would publish books someday, I would have been thrilled and amazed. I wouldn’t have understood what writing a novel or short stories requires—the inspiration, time, and labor, the revision, patience, and concentration. I wouldn’t have understood viscerally the struggles of writing or, ultimately, the joys.

Some days I don’t feel ready to write. There are distractions—real life, the black hole of emails and the internet. In the process of writing, though, I become ready. I embrace my relationship with words.

Even so, there’s a great gap between my hopes for a piece of writing and the limitations of my words on the page, between my vision of what I want to accomplish and my reach. I think about this every day. About the finite nature of time. Emerging as a writer later in life. Growing older. Time passing, running out. 

 What’s important is this: I continue to write and to reach, to feel fulfilled as a writer.

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Ronna Wineberg is the author of Artifacts and Other Stories (2022), which was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award; Nine Facts That Can Change Your Life (2016), a collection of stories, which received Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award; On Bittersweet Place (2014), a novel, winner of the Shelf Unbound Best Indie Book Competition; and a debut collection,Second Language (2005), winner of New Rivers Press Many Voices Project Literary Competition and the runner-up for the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction.

Her stories have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Colorado Review, American Way, and elsewhere, and have been broadcast on National Public Radio. She was awarded a fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a scholarship in fiction to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and residencies at Ragdale Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Ronna has also written blogs for Psychology Today. She is the founding fiction editor of the Bellevue Literary Review and lives in New York City.

To learn more about Ronna and her work, visit https://www.ronnawineberg.com/.