A Blaze of Glory, or a Long, Slow Climb Up the Mountain?

If you’re an aspiring writer, be sure to take a look at Malcolm Gladwell‘s case study on literary creativity in this week’s New Yorker, in which he considers the career trajectories of Ben Fountain and Jonathan Safran Foer, a compare-and-contrast between young wunderkinds and “late bloomers” who spend years, sometimes even decades, honing their craft before being discovered:

“On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith.”

It’s one of the best pieces about the realities of the writer’s life we’ve seen in the magazine since James B. Stewart‘s profile of James Wilcox back in 1994.

(And you can’t read it online, but we also enjoyed Dana Goodyear‘s profile of Gary Snyder this week.)

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