I had an informal conversation the other day with someone who has been mulling over a children’s story since…well since before Nixon was impeached oh so many impeachments ago. It did not take long to realize that this person was no longer mulling; over five decades the mulling had descended into dodging and shirking and other forms of evasion that masked an unwillingness to try.

Fifty years of gestation..no pregnant woman I know would tolerate that. (Yep, my forty-ninth year—just can’t seem to push that sucker out.)

But it was a frustrating conversation, for both of us probably. I kept wondering what the writer was waiting for, and the writer was lamenting the years of inaction. Eventually we both figured out the truth: the writer was a writer the same way I’m an airline pilot—it’s a nice fantasy, but it’s not happening.

Of course part of the problem here is that writing is hard. We can all fool ourselves and claim we never had the time, or there’s no ribbon in our typewriters, or the ink in our inkwells has dried up—every generation can produce its own justification. But writing demands more than excuses. It’s hard.

But imagine all the authors who would not have been authors if they’d felt that same lack of initiative;

Jane Austen of Pride and Prejudice fame—was dead at 41;

Charlotte Brontë died during pregnancy when she was 38;

On New Year’s Eve when you’re singing Auld Lang Syne, remember Robert Burns, dead at 37;

Much of our understanding of and insight into the Civil War comes by way of The Red Badge of Courage. Its author, Stephen Crane, lived only to see his 29th birthday;

“Lawrence of Arabia,” T./ E. Lawrence, died of injures sustained in a motorcycle accident. He was 46;

The most gifted Japanese writer of the 20th century, Yukio Mishima, committed ritual suicide at 45;

Henry David Thoreau, was one of countless tuberculosis victims, dead at 44.

Then there’d be library shelves bereft of The Great Gatsby, The Plague, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Look Homeward, Angel, et al. Not one of these works would have existed because their authors never celebrated a fiftieth birthday.

So get on with it. I mean, thank you for reading this—I appreciate it—now stop reading this and write something. Stop telling people about the idea you have for a book and get some words down on paper. Our life expectancy in 2019 certainly outstrips that of a hundred, two hundred years ago, but there are no guarantees and the clock ticks at the same pace.

Better get started.