Learning to Write

The literary journey of Mary McPhee

 

 It's taken all these years!

With crayons, block letters, a pencil on notebook paper, on a Smith-Corona portable, finally on a computer.  At age six, made newspapers for my Dad to read when he came home because he was a traveling man.  It was the first money I earned from my writing—2 to 5 cents an issue.

I graduated from college with a degree in journalism, and worked briefly on a small-town newspaper.  Then I moved to the big city of Denver, married and had five children so writing disappeared from my life for a long time.   In my late thirties, I started a journal.  The urge hit me at 5 a.m., a wonderful time of quiet and soft light from a single lamp at an old, scarred desk.  I used a yellow No. 2 pencil on lined notebook paper.  Because I was feeling some strong emotions at the time, I tried to put down the exact truth.   This could be dangerous or at least I must have thought so because I took great pains to hide my writing in manila envelopes stashed in secret places.  From time to time I used the pages as fire-starters, and like a heroine in a Jane Austen novel, watched my graphite squiggles be consumed.  I think journal-keeping was the best writing training I could give myself.

By and by, I began to write articles, mostly humorous, about my family life.  At that time, fortunately for freelancers, the newspaper business was booming.  Denver supported two daily newspapers, The Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post, both of which had Sunday magazine sections which ran a lot of pieces from freelancers.  I was up on a ladder painting the  living-room ceiling when the mailman brought my first check from The Post for a “casual” (as the New Yorker calls such writing) I’d written called “The Night Lightning Struck Our Happy Home.”  The check was for $50.  I treated the family to dinner out.  Soon enough, I was selling my casuals to both city dailies as well as other places, and the pay was always about $50.  Sometimes I used pen-names because I was shy about people I knew reading my published writing.

Then I discovered a small, large-circulation magazine, The Catholic Digest, and to brag a bit, they discovered me.  The editor loved my writing, and the money was far better:  $175 to $250 per article.  I sold many pieces to the Digest, earning top pay for major ones.  I hit the big time when I sold an article, a glossary of terms in the women’s movement (Ms. Magazine had just started), to The Chicago Tribune that was the lead article in their Sunday magazine section.

However, all this writing was nonfiction.  I craved to let my imagination express itself; that is, to make up stories.  Besides, I disliked the research required for factual writing.  So I began writing novels.     More  about that in my next post.

Mary McPhee