Interesting post on John Scalzi's blog: Why New Novelists are Kinda Old.

A lot of good discussion in the comments too. Scalzi mentions that actors and musicians tend to reach higher levels of achievement earlier on and someone commented that kids are often put into music lessons at a young age, but the same cannot be said for writing.

Scalzi and several others have posted a timeline of their own writing histories. I think it's interesting to see everybody's journey.

Ages in parentheses at the end.

1979-2003: Time spent learning to write well enough to write a novel (24)

Breakdown:
[1988: Started writing short stories and plays (9)]
[1991: Finished first terrible novella-length story (12)]
[1993: Finished second a-little-less-terrible novella-length story (14)]
[1993-1997: Wrote decent short stories and bad poetry (14-18)]
[1997: Began working on what would become my first complete novel (18)]

2003: Finished first complete (adult) novel (24)

2006: Finished second complete (YA) novel (27)

2007: Finished third complete (YA) novel (28)

2008: Finished fourth complete (YA) novel (29)

2009: Got an agent based on my fourth book (30)

I am a little younger than the average age of 35-37 in Scalzi's post. But I also am one of those kids who began taking writing seriously at age 9 and wrote all the time. I have wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, and at age 16 or 17 I formally dedicated myself to it. All I did was start a little earlier on getting my first million terrible words out of my system.

Another thing which factors in I think is finding your voice and your genre. I grew up loving sci-fi and fantasy. In middle school I wanted to be a playwright or write scripts for animated films. As a college English major I fell in love with poetry and with literary authors like Virginia Woolf and A. S. Byatt. When I decided to start writing YA it's like everything started clicking for me (as you can tell, finishing a complete novel a year in 2006, 2007 and 2008).

I think a lot of people who are prodigy writers, getting published in their late teens and early twenties, are often passionately dedicated to one genre or type of writing, and get in lots of practice writing in this genre. If I had continued assiduously writing only sci-fi and fantasy stories like I did in middle school, I may have peaked earlier. But I tried my hand at a lot of different types of writing before I started writing YA in 2004.

What's your timeline?