Just a few years out of law school, I decided that I wanted to write fictions. The only thing I had ever published before was a law-review article. I had made great efforts to write when I came home at night after work, but I was too tired. I decided to quit my job.

    I began my new life on a February morning. I sat down at my kitchen table at 7:30 am and made a resolution. Every day I would write until lunchtime. Then I would lie down on the floor for 20 minutes to rest my mind. After that, I would return to work for a few more hours.

    In my first year, I sold two stories. Then I wrote a novel, but I thought it wasn't good enough, so I ended up putting it in a drawer. My second novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, was published to glowing reviews and received the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

    My success sounds like a familiar story, but actually it was far from sudden. I quit my job, and for every story I published in those years, I had at least 30 rejections. The novel that I put away in the drawer took my four years. My breakthrough came in 2006, 18 years after I first sat down to write at my kitchen table.

    Sometimes genius (天才) is just the thing that comes out after 20 years of working at your kitchen. Also, doing something truly creative requires the energy of youth. Orson Welles made his masterpiece, Citizen Kan, at 25. T. S. Eliot wrote The Love Song of J. Afred Prufrock at 23.