Writing and All That Stuff by Michael Barrington, French martini

 Three rejection letters last week. That’s 409 since 2022. I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet since Covid. And yes, there’ve been successes too. Fourteen short stories published last year. But it raises the proverbial question, “Why do I write?”

I really don’t have an option, I used to say to myself. “I write because I have to,” and moved on. But is that really the truth? What is driving me to spend an inordinate number of hours each day putting stories onto paper, agonizing over word choice, and where failure to find the perfect phrase causes insomnia? Or am I just a dreamer, a gentleman of leisure without the inconvenience of an income, calmly squandering the hours as if the world had arranged itself solely for my amusement?

So, I had my astrological profile analyzed. Perhaps I could learn something there. Eureka! Yes. Among many other traits, Leos have a propensity for writing. And there’s good company out there to prove it: J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame, James Baldwin, Emily Brontë, Ray Bradbury, Suzanne Collins, and Alexander Dumas. Wow! But me?

My Ancestry profile shows that I am more than 50% Irish, and maybe that’s a place that might be worth exploring. After all, the Irish have the reputation as “story tellers,” and I have both maternal and paternal Irish connections. The genetic connection! But what is all this writing stuff?

Neither of my parents were writers, but both were avid readers, which they did every day of their lives. They ensured that from a very early age my sisters and I were enrolled in the local library. They were both gifted musicians— any writing relationship there? And both had beautiful penmanship. It was only late in life that I discovered my mother had kept a secret journal for years. Ahah. So, I can check that box; she too needed to write!

I have a sister who is a published author and writes both fantasy and poetry. Another is the family archivist and a journalist. I have a niece who writes poetry and has published a novel (romance). Another is a well-known local historian and researcher with several publications. My grandniece is a magazine editor and has also published several short stories. Does it all come down to genes?

I am convinced that my maternal grandfather caused this family epidemic. With just an eighth grade, rural education, and speaking English as a second language, he left Ireland and sought his fortune in Manchester, UK. Determined to be a gentleman, he took advantage of educational opportunities, attended night school and became a voracious reader. But here is where the genetic connection gets interesting. He was the landlord of The Shamrock Inn for thirty-six years, and while serving the local communities including huge numbers of Irish immigrants, he became known as a “storyteller,” a “Shannike,” (my poor translation from the Gaelic)!

So, is this what has been driving me—genes?

When I sit down at my computer, the room is quiet, but my mind is anything but. The moment my fingers hover over the keyboard, the voices begin. Characters press forward from somewhere just beyond thought, each one impatient, insistent, indignant almost, at being ignored. They crowd around the edges of my imagination, talking over one another, each trying to tell me who they really are. One wants to explain the wound he has carried since childhood. Another interrupts, eager to confess the secret she has hidden for years. A third laughs loudly, pushing his way into the scene, declaring that the story is really about him. Their voices overlap and jostle like people in a crowded room, each demanding to be heard first, each certain their history matters most.

I sit there, listening, half amused and half overwhelmed, trying to decide which one to follow. Sometimes I feel less like a creator than a reluctant host at a gathering I did not entirely plan. They arrive with their past already formed—their disappointments, their triumphs, their small, peculiar habits—and all they want is the chance to step forward and live on the page.

At moments like that, I feel as if I am two different people. One of me sits quietly at the desk, practical and deliberate, arranging sentences and choosing words with care. The other moves freely among these restless figures, hearing their whispers, sensing their moods, and letting them unfold their stories. Yet somehow the two selves work together. One listens; the other writes. And out of that strange partnership, the voices slowly become characters, the characters become stories, and the empty page begins to fill.

And yet there is a third person in the room.

Just when the voices are at their loudest—when a wounded soldier is trying to confess his past and a defiant young woman is insisting the story belongs to her, her child crying in the background—another presence clears his throat with quiet authority.

It is the practical one.

He reminds me that the dishwasher is finished and needs emptying. The garbage should really be taken out before it smells. There are errands waiting, ordinary duties that have nothing whatsoever to do with tragic heroes or secret histories.

He is unmoved by the urgency of fictional lives.

While the characters protest and try to drag him back to the glowing screen, this third self stands firmly in his imagination’s doorway and points toward the kitchen. He has a schedule, a sense of order, and a belief that life must continue in its sensible rhythms.

And he always has the last word.

“Later,” he says to the characters crowding in his head. “I’ll come back later.”

So, I take care of my chores. I step back into the simple machinery of daily life. Tonight my wife and I will go out for hamburgers. Tomorrow I will play golf. And all the while, somewhere behind the ordinary business of living, the voices will still be waiting—patient, persistent, prepared, ready to pounce the moment I sit down at the computer.

I never met my grandfather, yet I feel his presence in a way that is difficult to explain. He was, by all accounts, a genuine Irish storyteller—the sort of man who, after serving his customers a beer, could hold them there with nothing more than his voice and a well-spun tale.

I know him only through the stories others have told about him, but there is no doubt his influence lives in me. Perhaps it is simply the inheritance of blood. I carry his genes, after all. Or perhaps something less tangible travels quietly through families—the impulse to shape events into stories, to notice the small human moments that give life its color.

It may be a coincidence, or something more deliberate, that I bear my grandfather’s name. Sometimes I wonder if that alone carries a kind of quiet expectation, as if a fragment of his voice found its way forward through time.

I never heard him tell a story, yet when I sit down to write and the characters begin their clamoring, I cannot help but feel that somewhere in the background there is an old Irish storyteller smiling, leaning on the bar, a pint of beer in his hand, pleased that the tradition—however faintly—has continued.

So I continue to write my stories, not out of habit, but out of something closer to necessity. Along the way, I founded a small gathering for short story writers. Once a month, we come together simply to read, to listen, and to enjoy. There is no dissection of sentences, no weighing of merit—only the quiet, generous act of sharing. Voices rise and fall, some tentative, some assured, each carrying its own rhythm and truth.

At the same time, I am shaping my second collection of longer stories, a body of work that has taken years to gather itself into form. I plan to self-publish it this summer—a decision born not of impatience, but of resolve. These twenty-two stories have already traveled far. I sent them out into the world, one by one, to magazines and journals, each submission carrying a quiet hope. Most returned with courteous rejections—carefully worded, professionally distant. Others vanished altogether, slipping into that familiar void writers come to know too well, where no answer arrives. Not a single story was accepted. And yet, strangely, that absence of recognition never felt like the end of the journey.

The stories themselves refused to disappear. The characters continued to speak. They lingered in the background, interrupting, reminding, urging me forward. They did not care for rejection letters or editorial silence; they demanded only to be heard. There is a certain responsibility in that, a quiet obligation to give voice to what insists on being heard.

So, I return to the page, again and again, listening carefully, taking note, shaping their words into something that might endure. Whether published or not, these stories exist—and that, in the end, is reason enough to keep writing.

Bio:

Michael Barrington, has published 13 books, and more than 60 short stories. His most recent novel, Colourblind, recounts The Battle of Bamber Bridge. In 1943 the village welcomed 600 Black US soldiers but the army tried to impose segregation and violence errupted. He blogs on his website, www.mbwriter.net

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