12.

START NOW

So many people waste so much time worrying that “it’s too late to start.” They give their energies to excuses for why they can’t get to work. Bollocks! Many great artists, writers, actors, and others started late. Henri Rousseau didn’t begin painting till he was in his forties. Julia Margaret Cameron didn’t become a photographer until she was forty-eight. One of America’s greatest so-called outsider artists, Bill Traylor, a former slave, didn’t start making art till he was eighty-five.

You can start anytime. I know this firsthand, because I wasted decades not writing. I had a million stupid reasons: being afraid, feeling untrained, convinced I was unworthy, that I had nothing to say, that I was a fake, that I lacked the time or money or connections I’d need to make it in the art world. I’m not sure what got me to stop not-writing. Maybe it was when my wife, the art critic Roberta Smith, read my early work and told me, “If you don’t get better, I’m going to kill myself.” (The person closest to you shouldn’t have to sugarcoat critique.) Maybe I knew that nothing could be worse than what I was feeling. So, at forty, I finally got serious—living proof that it’s never too late.

Bill Traylor, Woman in Green Blouse with Umbrella, c. 1939