BUCKING THE MONKEY
By Charles Deemer
For the past decade, I’ve had a monkey on my back. It took until the end of summer, 2003, before I was able to buck the damn thing off.
The monkey was a figment of my imagination, which of course made it the worst kind of stressful companion. I’d invented the beast simultaneously with beginning a sober life early in 1994 when I left the V.A. Domiciliary to reenter the unstructured world, a graduate of the CARS program (Chemical Addiction Rehabilitation Services), which included 28 days of intense in-patient treatment followed by six months of more flexible in-patient treatment in “the Dom.”
The monkey appeared when I looked back at my life and realized that a professional decision I’d made in 1972 may have been a mistake. At the time I was in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Oregon, specializing in fiction. I had finished most of my class work and was concentrating on my thesis, a novel. The work wasn’t going well.
In 1971 I had entered a playwriting competition for no other reason than that the prize was a lot of money. I’d never written a play before. I came in second but there was no monetary prize attached. Nonetheless I was encouraged to give writing for the stage a closer look. The next year I entered again and won – and for the first time read the small print in the contest rules. The sizable cash prize was, in fact, a fellowship with strings attached. I was required to pursue an M.F.A. in Playwriting. Since the thesis-novel was still in trouble, I changed my emphasis for the Masters from fiction to playwriting.
For the next thirty years I was a playwright. Over forty of my scripts were produced, a lot of these inconsequential commissions about regional history, but I was able to look with pride at over a dozen plays I’d written and seen produced. I had earned a reputation as a major regional (Northwest) playwright. In the 1980s I became an early playwright involved in hyperdrama and shortly thereafter a pioneer in developing the form on the Internet. In other words, I had a reasonably successful “out of New York” playwriting career.
With sobriety came the distressful realization that this career actually was not the career I would have preferred. In fact, I was not a natural playwright. In the beginning of my playwriting career I wasn’t even a theater person, a serious failure that was pointed out and corrected by a charismatic director named Leland Starnes, who had been on the faculty at the Yale Drama School. He browbeat me into becoming an actor for his productions at a small college on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and it was this experience, more than my M.F.A. studies in playwriting, that turned me into a skilled writer for the stage.
By temperament I was never a playwright. Sober, I liked to crash early. It was drinking that kept me going late at night. I always preferred writing “solo” to collaboration and yet playwriting is collaborative by nature. But most seriously, I thought in the grand story structures more naturally set in the novel than on stage.
What disturbed me most when I looked back at my playwriting career from the distance of sobriety was that I had become a playwright because it was easier for me in the short run than sweating out the difficult learning curve to learn the novelist’s craft. I had mastered the short story form because my writing weakness, descriptive prose, was less critical in the shorter form of fiction. But creating a sense of time and place with language, which was very difficult for me, is at the foundation of the novelist’s craft. Because writing dialogue was easy for me and playscripts use little descriptive prose (though my early plays gave away my fictional roots with far too much stage directions), I did have certain natural playwriting skills. I also liked being “recognized” with the success of my first plays. Still, the choice was driven by short-term psychological needs and overall laziness.
Sober, I tried to write long fiction again. It was a struggle. I wrote hundreds of pages of false starts on a novel. This time I forced myself to learn how to set time and place with prose. I kept at it. I threw away reams and reams of paper, but I kept at it. And finally, one day, a few years later, I had a novel, about 101,000 words in length, called Emmett’s Gift.
I didn’t expect to
sell it but I marketed it because this is what professional writers do. To my
shock, over a dozen agents wanted to read its early chapters. Several asked for
more, and two asked for the complete manuscript. In the end, no one took it on
but several had nice things to say about my writing and the book and, best, all
took it seriously, all treated it like a
novel. If it wasn’t a novel that would be an easy sell in today’s
marketplace, well, I already knew that. The more important point was, I had written a novel and agents treated it with the
respect a novel deserves.
But I didn’t want to write a 100,000 word novel again. I wanted to write short novels about half the length. Why? Because I had too many stories to tell and not enough time in which to write them all. With sobriety also came a stronger sense of my mortality than I’d ever had before. Indeed, only luck had me alive today, so regularly did I drive and drink and do other careless behaviors under the influence. Now I was living on gravy, to use Raymond Carver’s perfect term. I have no idea how many years I have left but I do know that no matter how many there are, they will not be enough to tell all the stories in me.
So the next novel was short. To make sure it was, I first wrote it as a screenplay. The novel “expansion,” which became Love At Ground Zero, came in at a length some would call a novella, others a short novel.
I am particularly fond of this book because in it I find a unique voice. It also has the same kind of recklessness that is in my favorite play, The Half-Life Conspiracy. And, of course, I had written a second novel!
I figured I now had earned the right to call myself a novelist. Of course, the powers-that-be might disagree, given that neither has set the commercial world of publishing on fire. But that’s another issue. Both are solid, well crafted novels, whatever their commercial failings. I am proud to have written both of them. I especially am proud to have written them back to back.
I no longer feel like I wasted my time being a playwright. If I’d taken ill before I was able to write the novels, I think I would have regretted my career decision a great deal. The monkey would still be on my back. But now that I’ve written long fiction, and through print-on-demand can get my novels in the library despite the judgments of commercial publishing, I regret my past less. I did good work as a playwright, however unnatural the rhythms and nightly life of the theater person was for me. It was a good experience, a good ride. But it is not where my soul is as a writer. My soul is writing books for the library.
The monkey is now off my back, and this is exactly what I will keep on doing.
Charles Deemer
September 17, 2003
More essays: http://www.ibiblio.org/cdeemer/Essays.htm