Mark Farrington spent nearly four decades teaching other people how to write fiction. For most of that time, he wrote short stories himself — award-winning ones. But the novel, the form he says he always loved best as a reader, eluded him.
That changed this year with the publication of Loss of Life, Farrington’s debut novel, which arrives after a career that included 25 years teaching inwriting programs at Johns Hopkins University. Farrington, who grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, recently retired from full-time teaching and relocated to Maine after more than three decades living outside Washington, D.C. His resume includes the Editor’s Choice Award in the Raymond Carver Fiction Contest for his short fiction, an Individual Artist Grant from the Virginia Commission on the Arts, four Outstanding Faculty Awards from the Johns Hopkins MA in Writing program, the Outstanding Service Award from the Northern Virginia Writing Project and the Outstanding Alumni Award from George Mason University’s English Department, where he earned his MFA in fiction writing. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and American literature from Colby College.
Loss of Life follows Matthew Winton, a 41-year-old college professor who wakes in a Virginia hospital after a car accident with no memory of anything past age 13. Winton is also a writer, and as he tries to reconstruct his past, he runs into a problem particular to his craft: He has spent his career writing fiction, and he can no longer tell where the blurred line between invention and fact actually falls. A policewoman investigating the crash becomes his guide back into his own life, and, eventually, something more.
The idea took root more than a decade ago, when Farrington read a Washington Post article about a woman who woke up one morning having lost her memory for no medical reason anyone could identify. “That really stuck with me,” he said, though he set the premise aside while he worked on other projects. It resurfaced as he got older and began noticing the ordinary slippage of memory — a name that will not come, an actor he cannot place. “I began to think about what it would be like” if that slippage were total, he said.
But Farrington is emphatic that amnesia is not really what the book is about. “The amnesia is actually a vehicle for me,” he said. “It’s not a book about amnesia.” He gave Winton memory up to age 13 rather than none at all, in part to avoid chaos on the page, but mostly because total memory loss would have crowded out the real subject: a man who, even before the accident, had never been fully honest with himself. Stripping away his memory, Farrington said, was “really the only way to get him to go back and look more honestly” at his own life.
Structurally, the novel splits roughly in half. The first section follows Winton navigating a world that has moved on nearly 30 years past what he remembers — a man whose points of reference stop at 1969 trying to function in 1997, unfamiliar with computers, cellphones or almost anything else. In one scene, Winton fills his grocery cart with ice cream, hot dogs and Twinkies: the tastes of a 13-year-old, not a 41-year-old professor. “That was kind of fun for me,” Farrington said. “It was just creating a challenge.” The second half, in which Winton travels from Virginia to Massachusetts in search of the people who can help him reassemble his history, was harder to write but allowed him to examine the issues he cared most about.
Farrington’s chapters, he noted, tend to run about 15 pages — not far from the length of his typical short story — and he thinks of each one as a self-contained unit rather than a cliffhanger, even as each also has to plant seeds for what comes later. That instinct, he said, comes from decades of writing short fiction, even though the connective demands of a novel are different: “There’s no Rocky II in my background.”
Much of Farrington’s approach to the book mirrors what he teaches. He does not outline in advance — a habit he traces to a rigid, outline-first approach to writing drilled into him in grade school and high school, one he found suffocating. He prefers to let a story reveal itself as he writes, trusting what a longtime teacher of his called the question of “what does this story want to be,” rather than what the writer wants to make it. He compared the feeling to a line often attributed to E.L. Doctorow, that writing a novel is like driving at night in the fog: “You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
That does not mean Farrington rejects outlines outright, at least not anymore. He described a British novelist’s metaphor that stuck with him — an outline as a fence around the property of the story, one that frees a writer to be as spontaneous as they like because they know roughly where the boundaries are. His advice to students: Use the outline as a framework, not a dictum, and never shut a door on something unplanned that might turn out to be interesting.
Revision, not drafting, is where Farrington has developed some of his most distinctive methods. He is skeptical of writers who move straight from a finished draft into cutting. Instead, he developed what he calls a “draft 1A” — a second pass, written without looking back at the first, that expands and explores anything skimmed over the first time through. He described one story that grew from 6,000 words in its first draft to 13,000 in its second before he trimmed it back down to about 7,500 — arriving, he said, at roughly the same length but with far better material. He also assigns what he calls a reverse outline: breaking a finished draft into parts, summarizing what each part accomplishes in a single sentence, then lining up those sentences to check for order, redundancy and gaps.
Underlying much of what he teaches is a theory he says cannot be disproved, one that has made him gentler with himself as a writer: that everyone carries bad writing inside them, and that getting it out is what clears the way to the good writing underneath.
Asked what typically holds his graduate students back — most of them in their 30s, since the Johns Hopkins program is part-time — Farrington pointed less to technical deficiencies than to an inability to quiet the analytical mind long enough to write. Many arrive from careers built on critical judgment and struggle to let a story unfold on its own terms rather than controlling it from the outset. “Anybody who writes can have a plan, and the plan can be as detailed as they want it to be,” he said, “provided they are open to things coming up that they hadn’t anticipated.”
Farrington now writes in the mornings, before his critical mind fully wakes up, a habit that took years to settle into after false starts writing at night. He tries to write daily, though he acknowledges he does not always manage it, and he counsels students with full lives to treat writing sessions like unbreakable doctor’s appointments, scheduled a week in advance.
Looking back, Farrington identifies one turning point as the moment his writing and his teaching stopped being separate pursuits. After finishing his undergraduate degree, he briefly left education altogether, convinced that the way he had been taught to write — rigid, outline-bound, correctness-focused — was not something he wanted to pass on. He worked as a security guard and drove a van for special-needs students while trying to write. Graduate school at George Mason, and later an encounter with the National Writing Project, changed his mind. The organization’s core belief that teachers of writing must themselves be practicing writers, paired with its emphasis on writing as a process with distinct stages, gave Farrington a model that finally made sense to him. From his mid-30s onward, he said, writing and teaching “became the same thing,” each one sharpening the other, even as balancing both remained a lifelong negotiation with time.
With Loss of Life published, Farrington is dividing his attention between promoting the novel and finishing a short story collection, most of which is already written or previously published in pieces. A second novel is on his mind, though only in the loosest form. True to his own advice, he does not plan to outline it before he starts. “I’ll just write blankly for a while,” he said, “and then at some point I’ll step back and say, okay, what is this, or what might this become.”