I stole/borrowed the “Things I Promised Not to Tell” concept from a political podcaster but no posts in this series will be about politics. Instead it will feature vignettes from my personal, non-photographic life that may or may not have made me into the man that I am today. Today it’s about my writing career and how it got started.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” ―
It seems that I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I don’t know why. Perhaps its because I’ve always been an avid reader. In a recent Book Club post I mentioned that Edgar Rice Burroughs began his writing career because ““if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, I could write stories just as rotten.” I never believed that. Instead, I always admired writers ranging from Arthur Conan Doyle to Kurt Vonnegut. and wanted to be able to create something similar, although it turned out that fiction was not my forté but that’s a story for another time.
Caption: Photograph of me by Mary Farace back in the day when we were in our studio and my writing career was just starting to take off but I was hedging my bets by trying to improve my photography and the quality of the work that Mary and I delivered to our clients.
A Kurt Vonnegut Interlude: I’ve always admired Curt Vonnegut’s writing because of his creativity and musical fluidity with words. (And maybe that why I like writing; I love words.) I once was lucky enough to attend a writing workshop conducted by Mr, Vonnegut. Afterwards I was so excited about the experience that when talking to my friend Rohn Engh about it, he told me, it was “a waste of money” and you “won’t learn anything.” Did attending the workshop improve my writing? Maybe it did but maybe it didn’t but what attending the workshop surely did for me was inspire me to be a better writer.
Back to My Story…
You see, as a kid I went to an all-boys engineering high school—Baltimore Polytechnic Institute—where English, which was taught as a mish-mash of grammar and literature, was not treated as being important as the school’s Math and mechanical drawing classes, or even shop. At Johns Hopkins University I only took two English classes, one was about English literature, which I think improved my outlook about writing and appreciation of literature and poetry that I never thought of before, and a class that was called Writing for Engineers in which I actually did some writing. I got a B on that one, I don’t know about the Lit class, probably a C because that was my typical grade at Hopkins.
Later when I was working for the Great American Telephone company in Maryland, I’d managed to write an article for Telephony magazine about using audio visuals as a marketing tool but it wasn’t published until after I left the company and moved to Colorado. Here the owners of the studio where I now worked asked me to write a magazine article about one of my passions—3D photography. I actually ended up writing two articles on that subject for two different magazines. You can see my cover photo for one of them here.
At one point, the company asked me to speak about photography for slide shows at a convention in Anaheim and I met someone who would change my life. Fred Schmidt* was the editor of Photomethods magazine and after my presentation, he came up to me and asked, “could you turn that speech into a magazine article?” I said sure, after all I had by then written three magazine stories by then. So I wrote the article, submitted it to Photomethods and forget all about it until one day a check arrived. That’s when I thought to myself, “I could make a living doing this” and did so for many years after that. These days Not so much.
*Fred Schmidt was the long time editor of Photomethods and I ended up as a Contributing Editor, writing a monthly column for that magazine for many years until it, like so many other photographic publications of that era, ceased operation. Fred passed away many years later but I have many fond memories of him as a friend, mentor and editor. He was a great influence on my life, both writing and otherwise and one of my earliest photography books is dedicated to him.
PS: I realize that a whole lot of time, 40 years to be exact, in this story have been compressed into 400 words but if anybody bothers to read this, maybe I can expand one of the sections into an upcoming installment of Things I Promised Not to Tell.