My Writing Life

It’s always been easier for me to say the most difficult things in writing than to speak them aloud. When I was a child and something happened that upset my mother, I often wrote her a letter, apologizing for whatever role I had played in that upset and promising never to do it again (even if I wasn’t quite sure what it was I had done), and leaving that letter on her pillow. In seventh grade, I decided to be creative when doing a writing assignment (at a time when creativity wasn’t much appreciated in education) and wrote on the topic of “An important day in my life” by telling about the day of my birth, in a voice that claimed to be a newborn but spoke like a stand-up comic. The teacher read my writing aloud and the class laughed (at all the right places.) It was a heady experience.

In ninth grade I wrote a few hundred pages of what purported to b a novel. It was about nine strangers whose plane crash left them stranded on a deserted island. (Kind of a serious version of “Gilligan’s Island.”) I’m sure it was horrid, but I was proud of all the time and effort I put into it. Then in eleventh grade I wrote a short story that in today’s climate probably would have got me sent to a psychiatrist. It was based on a real event in which a man climbed to the top of a tower in Texas and began indiscriminately shooting people below. I wrote it from the point of view of the shooter. I wasn’t trying to be provocative, I was simply attempting to understand what might compel a person to do such a thing.

At that time, Johnny Carson would occasionally book a writer for the last ten minutes of his show, and Dick Cavett gave some of the more famous writers (Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal) headline status. I confess while watching, I dreamed of one day being one of those writers. I think that was probably my definition of success as a writer at that time: ten minutes with Johnny Carson. Rather than being a writer – someone who writes – I wanted to be someone who had written.

I had always found all writing easy, and certainly in Literature classes, I always did well largely because of my writing skill. In college I focused more on academic writing than creative writing, although I thought they were the same thing, that they used the same process. Yet my academic writing seemed to be much more well received than my fiction.

As my time in college ended, realizing I had no idea what kind of job I wanted to get, or even how to go about getting a job, I applied at the last minute to the University of Louisville Masters program in creative writing. There I wrote a story that got published. This was eye opening for me, because I’d been telling myself that if only I could publish a story, then I would finally feel like a “real writer.” Instead I concluded, “That must not be a very good magazine, if they’ll publish a story by me.” (Over the years, I’ve learned that two of the professions most affected by “imposter syndrome” are writing and teaching, and I managed to hit them both.)

I left Louisville after a year, got a job as a teacher at a small private Quaker school outside Philadelphia, and never wrote a word of fiction during the nearly two years I was there. I think at some level I realized how easy it would be for me to stay forty years at that school, only to be hit with the regret of never having really tried to see if I could make it as a writer. I quit my job and moved back to Massachusetts, where I’d grown up, to try and teach myself to be a fiction writer.

I learned a lot during those next five years. One thing I learned was that most professional writers did not write the way I’d been taught to write in school. My teachers had emphasized principles like, “Never put a word down on paper until you know exactly what you want to say,” or “Revision means correcting your grammar.” But on my own I read things like Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer, where she talks about the conscious and the subconscious mind, or the collected letters of Flannery O’Connor, where she admitted that she had no idea what she thought until she saw what she had written down.

I wrote a novel that I first mapped out completely, except for one short section that came to me spontaneously, out of nowhere – and that section ended up as the only interesting part of the whole book. I did publish a couple of stories in very small magazines, but I did not feel I was learning as much as I needed to learn, or learning it fast enough, and I ended up heading off to the MFA program in fiction writing at George Mason University.

There I had what for me were great successes. The faculty liked my fiction, I published three or four stories, won a contest that had a monetary prize. I also became editor-in-chief of the university’s literary magazine, Phoebe: The George Mason Review. For my thesis I wrote a novel that to this day I believe could have been published, if only I’d been a little better at my craft, as I tried to tell a story that was a bit more complex than my skill level could handle.

But perhaps the most significant success I had during my three years in grad school was in teaching. As I talked about in “My teaching life,” I discovered that I could be a teacher who taught writing the same way as professional writers wrote, the way I’d been trying to learn to write on my own for the past several years.

I can say now that I wish it hadn’t taken me another three decades to truly learn what that writing process was all about. I learned it gradually, the quality of my writing increasing by small steps. I learned the process better when teaching it to my students than when adopting it in my own writing. Occasionally, I hit upon a story that worked, and it got published in a decent, though not top-flight, literary journal. I won a couple of small awards. I wrote a couple of novels that got me agents but couldn’t interest a publisher enough to take a chance.

In some ways, I think what kept me going as a writer was the success I was having as a writing teacher, winning more teaching awards than writing ones, publishing articles on the teaching of writing, watching so many students I worked with have success with their own writing, at least in small part because of the help I’d given them. But my own writing always felt like less than I’d hoped it could be.

Then I wrote a story, “Motherlove,” that won an editor’s choice award in the Raymond Carver Short Story contest at CARVE magazine. I became friends with the editor, and he helped me see some of the ways my stories could be improved, and he published another of mine in CARVE.

I wrote a few other stories that I liked, and that also got published, and then hit upon a story called at the time “2.24.63,” (the title later changed to “The Radio”) about a teenage boy with a difficult father who listens to the radio broadcast of a young Cassius Clay (aka Mohammad Ali) defeating Sonny Liston to become heavyweight boxing champion of the world. I know many writers have a favorite story that doesn’t match their reader’s favorites, and that may be the case with “The Radio,” but for me, that story marked the first one I’d ever written where I read it and felt that it was a better story than I believed myself capable of writing.

I’ve had that feeling a few times since, and it makes me optimistic that I’m finally learning how to incorporate into my own writing the process I’ve been teaching to my students for decades. When I ask myself why, or how I got to this place, I come up with answers such as, “I finally got out of my own way,” or “I stopped caring so much about what other people might think of me.” I suspect it’s those things and many others as well.

I enjoy the act of writing more now. I’ve pretty much stopped looking for my writing to justify my existence, or to make people notice me or think a certain way about me. Now I just try to tell a good story. Everything seems a lot better that way.

©Mark Farrington 2026