Marion resident Randall Peffer's 30-year writing career began with a newspaper route.

“I didn’t realize it as a kid but I guess I was always a writer,” he said.

While delivering newspapers as a kid, Peffer said he created stories to keep his mind occupied.

“I made up a story everyday. I had a cast of characters and it would always start with a dramatic situation. Once I got to the next house, I would have to think of a turning point in the story,” he said.

Since then, Peffer has started writing those stories down.

The author of nine books and more than 300 travel pieces for National Geographic and Smithsonian magazine, Peffer’s work includes a Civil War trilogy series.

His latest work, “Screams and Whispers,” was published last year and is the sixth in his Cape Islands mystery series.

The son of a naval pilot, Peffer grew up in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Like his father and grandfathers before him, Peffer spent a lot of time working on boats.

While attending the University of New Hampshire graduate school for poetry, Peffer began writing travel features for specialty magazines.

“I asked myself: ‘What do I know?’ I know boats and trains. I went to a train magazine and started writing features for them. Then I worked for Sailing magazine and was editor of Wooden Boat magazine. It just went on from there. I had a couple of great adventures writing those stories,” he said.

He began his career writing fiction on the Chesapeake Bay off the coast of Maryland.

His first book, “Watermen,” was published in 1979 and told the fictional account of the sailors and fishermen - a job Peffer himself had done for years.

“My mother’s family had been Chesapeake Bay watermen. I worked there because I wanted to know what my ancestors lived like. That fueled my enthusiasm for traditional water crafts and big work boats,” he said.

Peffer moved to Mattapoisett in 1978 before settling in Marion.

Beyond his career as an author, Peffer is also a writing professor at Phillips Academy in Andover.

Peffer started an oceans course at the school that combined marine sciences with creative writing. To get his students on the water doing research and writing, Peffer purchased a 50-foot schooner named the Sarah Abbot after the Phillips Academy alum.

He has since “retired” the program to spend more time with his family, but Peffer hasn’t slowed down writing.

He already has his next two books completed and is working on a love story set in Barcelona and Cuba. The latter, he said, is “just for fun.”

Peffer is also working on a non-fiction book about the Guadalcanal, which he first visited with his father in 1992.

The key to balancing writing, teaching and family is simple, he said. “I’m hyperactive.”