Sprint VS. Marathon

I’ve been reading the book Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant. And I was thinking of the playwright Christopher Shinn and the fiction writer Lore Segal. Shinn was nominated at the age of 33 in 2008 for a Pulitzer. Segal at 80 was also nominated in 2008. I also remembered a quote by the sometimes annoying Tony Kushner. I wish I could find the quote, but he said something to the effect that if you’re a playwright and haven’t had any success by the time you’re 35 you’re basically a wash-up. Grant writes about how we remember the young geniuses, in the arts and sciences. I love this quote: “…although we’re quick to remember the young geniuses who peak early, there are plenty of old masters who soar much later… In film, for every Orson Wells, whose masterpiece Citizen Cane was his very first feature film at age twenty-five, there is an Alfred Hitchcock, who made his three most popular films three decades into his career, at ages fifty-nine (Vertigo), sixty (North by Northwest), and sixty-one (Psycho). In poetry, for every e.e. cummings, who penned his first influential poem at twenty-two and more than half of his best work before turning forty, there is a Robert Frost, who wrote 92 percent of his most reprinted poems after forty.” He goes on to write that creators have different ways of inventing: experimenting and conceptualizing. The latter starts out with a big idea and attacks it. The former figures it out as he or she goes. One is a sprinter and one a marathon runner. He goes on to write about e.e. cummings. “After imagining his own rules of language, grammar and punctuation in his early twenties, by age fifty, as one critic remarked, ‘Cummings is still the experimentalist of one experiment.’” So what about playwrights such as Shinn and David Lindsay-Abaire and fiction writers such as Jonathan Safran Foer? Ripcord, Lindsay-Abaire’s last play, didn’t exactly get glowing reviews. Shinn is now doing plays where the ancient Horton Foote was put out to pasture (yes, we know. Foote’s language is gorgeous. And he was working on his The Orphan’s Home Cycle into his 90’s) and Nicky Silver, stumbles, gets up, sprints, gets up, falls and seems to stumble again. References Grant, A. (2016). Originals: How non-conformists move the world. New York, NY: Viking.