Regular visitors to my website, of whom I have none, will have noticed that (a) I haven’t posted anything in the better part of a year, and (b) I did recently make a slight change to the site banner, replacing the phrase “Playwright at Large” with “Writer at Large.” Behind that, my friends, lies a story.
I have noted in a previous posts that being a playwright during a pandemic is not easy. The truth is, it’s no cakewalk being a playwright even when there isn’t a virus keeping people out of enclosed public spaces. Even before Covid-19 rang down the curtains on theaters everywhere, I had reached something of an impasse in my playwriting career. The only full-length play of mine that was getting any productions was Absence, and that hadn’t gotten any traction since its Italian revival in early 2019. I found that I was even having difficulty getting my shorter plays produced. I found it harder and harder to come up with ideas for writing plays, short or long. Not to put too fine a point on it, the magic had gone out of my dramatic writing.
The year-long shutdown of live theater thus seemed an opportune moment to reassess my writing career. I found that I still had the urge to write, but that urge was not pointing to the writing of plays. Rather, I found myself steering (or maybe being steered) back to my first love, fantastic fiction.
When I first had the urge to become a writer, back in my early teens, it was not my aspiration to be a dramatist. No, what I dreamed of was to be a writer of fantasy and/or science fiction. (These were broadly referred to as “speculative fiction,” a term which always sounded awkward to me.) From an early age, I read a ridiculous amount of fantasy: I loved the work of J.R.R. Tolkien (of course), Lewis Carroll, Lloyd Alexander, Alan Garner, and many others. As I entered my teens, my tastes grew to include science fiction from soft to hard: Isaac Asimov, Philip José Farmer, Frank Herbert, and Philip K. Dick. I particularly liked the work of those authors who danced on the edge between the two categories, like Harlan Ellison and Gene Wolfe. I decided that I was going to be an f/sf writer myself.
And yet that didn’t happen. Or at least it took a long time. I would start writing stories but get bogged down almost as soon as I started. Over the years, I would put my ambition away for a while and pursue some other vocation, but somehow I would always come back to writing. I felt like a writer, even if I wasn’t doing any of it.
About twenty years ago, I finally put some effort into writing a few stories, and managed to complete some of them. I sent them out to various publishers, and they were promptly (well, sometimes not so promptly) rejected. And quite understandably; they were terrible. I wasn’t ready to be an s/sf writer yet, it seemed.
I changed gears then, and tried writing for children. I wrote two books, one a comic fantasy and one a comic sf tale, that I thought were quite good. I sent them out to agents who did not share that opinion.
It was about then that I wrote my first short play, “The Little Death.” I brought it before the community theater group with whom I’d been working as an actor, and offered to direct it as part of their group of summer one-acts. (The was in 2005.) To my amazement, the board accepted it, and to my further amazement it did quite well. Having finally gotten some positive feedback on my writing, I plunged into my career as a playwright, getting many short plays produced at festivals, getting my M.F.A. in playwriting at Boston University, and then finally getting a production of my full-length play Absence at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre in 2014. I seemed to have made it.
But I had not made it. Absence got a few more productions, but none of the other full-length plays of mine got any traction, and as noted above I started having less and less success with my short plays.
And so I returned to my first love, fantastic fiction. (Wait, I said that already.) I started working on short stories, and quickly found the genre that worked for me: Darkly comic fantasies. (Perhaps not surprisingly, as most of my best plays fall under that category. A major exception is Absence which, being a serious tale about a woman suffering from dementia, is something of an outlier in my work.)
I found, when rereading what I’d written, that I rather enjoyed it, and so began submitting my work to various print and online magazines with hope. For a long time, that hope seemed baseless; I kept receiving rejection after rejection. Well, that’s par for the course for a fledgling writer, I suppose. It didn’t help that there must have been thousands of fledgling writers around the world who similarly found themselves stuck at home with nothing better to do than pound out stories and send them off, so that the slush piles must have been even bigger (and slushier) than usual.
And then one day the metaphorical sun rose on my new career: my novelette “On Milligan Street” had been accepted by the e-magazine GigaNotoSaurus.org, and would (will) be published by them on September 1. (Cheers and applause from the audience.)
It’s taken me forty years, but I’ve at last become an f/sf writer.