Mark Trainer Archives – Christina Baker Kline

In which the writer Mark Trainer explains how old ideas can spring to life when you least expect it:

One of my writing teachers way back when, George Garrett, used to say of being a writer, “Nothing is ever lost.” He meant it as comfort when every lit mag under the sun had rejected your story. Just because you can’t make use of it now doesn’t mean you won’t be able to years down the road. It’s true for the ideas we have for stories as well. The first story I published originated with a single sentence I discovered in some notebooks (otherwise terrible) that I’d written when I was fourteen or fifteen.

The story that St. Martins Press has just published as an e-book, New Wife, had an even longer gestation. I’m not proud of this, but during college some friends and I used to watch a soap opera during lunch—okay, it was All My Children. When they change one of the actors on a soap — just before her first appearance — there’s usually a voice-over that says, “The part of Alexis Stone [or whoever] is now being played by Jane Smith.” But if you miss the day when this announcement is made, you tune in next time to see a stranger being treated as though she is Alexis. Alexis’s children hug this unfamiliar person and call her Mommy. All the family pictures used for set decoration now include this person, as though the former actor had never existed. I remember thinking back then that it would be interesting to transpose that situation onto the real world. Maybe it would make a good skit for SNL or something. It just took 25 years to find the context that would give this idea resonance.

Here’s a strange and dangerous thing: The ideas that have worked the best in this way are the ones I never wrote down. Maybe it’s because they seemed more like gags than the seeds of Literary Fiction. Sometimes even in the simple act of jotting down an idea, you limit it in some way, give it a point of view and a context that fix it in the place it was found rather than letting it find the place it wants to go.

Late last spring, I found myself thinking about a couple of much older friends suffering from memory loss and dementia. It led me to think how delicate the mental threads are that connect us to the people closest to us, and how we forget some things exactly because we never imagined we could forget them. The name of your best friend’s husband or the lyric to a favorite song will temporarily slip away because they’re so familiar you haven’t taken any steps to fix in them in your memory. I have elaborate systems in place to make sure I remember where my glasses are, but nothing to make sure I remember my daughter’s face.

I was sitting in a coffee shop on Capitol Hill across from my wife, both of us staring into computers. Could the misfiring of a couple of neurons, I thought to myself as I looked over the table, make me forget you? And then I’d be like that viewer watching the soap opera, wondering why everyone was pretending that this stranger was my wife. I wrote the first few paragraphs and then realized the meter on our parking space was about to run out. (And a note about titles: I had to save the file as something as we rushed out; “New Wife” was the product of half a second’s thought, but it never got changed.)

The rest of the writing was a process of following a small idea to its logical conclusion, placing an odd premise in a context that’s as recognizable and ordinary as most of our daily lives. If my character doesn’t recognize his wife, what about his son? Will he forget him too? Wouldn’t he have to manage his job, his household chores, and everything else while he wonders why no one else thinks this woman isn’t who she’s supposed to be? And is there a reason for all this forgetting? Is there any way to turn it around? I felt like I’d come a long way from the soap-opera-casting premise and found a way to express something about how we incorporate our past into our present.

It’s a great feeling to find a good use for something that’s been kicking around your writer’s toolbox for years. Better still when it’s something you could so easily have forgotten. And yet you didn’t.

Mark Trainer (@marktrainer on Twitter) is a writer living on Capitol Hill. His stories have appeared in The Mississippi Review, Shenandoah, Brain, Child, and elsewhere. His nonfiction has appeared in The Washington Post.

Writer Mark Trainer talks about what he learned from Pulitzer-prizewinning author Peter Taylor:

peter taylor cover I used to work for the writer Peter Taylor. Because of a series of strokes, he wasn’t able to type his own manuscripts. He was barely able to write legibly with a pen. I had been a fan of his writing since college, and so jumped at the chance to see how he worked. I learned a lot from him. Here are two things–a big lesson and a small trick.

First the small trick. The narratives of Peter Taylor’s finished stories had a wonderful way of seemingly straying here and there, as though the narrator were recalling whichever events from the time he was writing about popped into his mind. By story’s end he always pulled these strands together to powerful effect.

While he was dictating a new story to me, I noticed he kept repeating the same line. It was something like, “And so another person in my life disappeared seemingly without a trace.” In every day’s work, this line would come up at least once. I thought maybe he was slipping in his old age, repeating the same line again and again. But I also didn’t think it was my place to tell him how to write a story.

Then one day he dictated the line again and told me that he sometimes did this in his stories when he was afraid of losing track of a central idea that brought the narrative together–he’d just repeat the central idea again and again to keep from straying too far away from it. And sure enough, when he handed me back subsequent drafts of the story, each time iterations of the line were struck out. It seemed to me each appearance of the line was like a piece of scaffolding used for construction and taken away when he no longer needed it.

Now for the big lesson. Like I said, in the years I knew him, toward the end of his life, Peter Taylor couldn’t type. He could barely read his own handwriting. Sometimes it took him a long time to find the right words when he spoke. I was in my mid-twenties with no physical ailments and no responsibilities. I wrote an hour or two a day but was easily distracted by my social life, my job waiting tables, or maybe an old episode of The Rockford Files.

A few days a week I’d trudge over to Peter Taylor’s house and each day he would have pages of handwritten manuscript he’d worked over painfully, small notes scribbled on pieces of junk mail and napkins. When he couldn’t sleep at night he’d dictate into a tape recorder. Sometimes he tried the typing, slowly, slowly. When he put all this together, his daily output invariably dwarfed my own. Back then, I wrote like someone with no limits on time and opportunity. At his age, he knew better.

Mark Trainer is a writer in Washington DC. His fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, The Greensboro Review, The Mississippi Review, and others. His nonfiction has appeared in The Washington Post. He’s currently working on a collection of stories called Bad Daddies.

Nothing is Ever Lost

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COMING MAY 2026: THE FOURSOME

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