I made the decision to self-publish my first novel, The Naked Truth, in an alcoholic blackout, in spite of the fact that it was a few edits short of a decent read. I had hung up my police officer’s hat after a booze-soaked eighteen years, and grimly decided it was time to begin writing again, something I had more or less walked away from when I left college and a few years later, got married...to the son of family friends, who happened to manage a liquor store. How convenient.
I started working on The Naked Truth during desk duty at our local regional airport, and I finished it awash in wine and sorrow over the abrupt end of my law enforcement career. In the category of “write what you know” it was a hybrid police-procedural romance, a genre possibly of my own invention. Did I mention it could have used some extra edits?
Yeah.
It wasn’t that I didn’t look for help, I have always been a fan of books on writing. My favorite how-to (and what not to) writing book is Stephen King’s On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft. I am not alone in my admiration, as I see it at the top of most lists of books of its kind. I think the only book on writing that could knock it down a spot would be the one J.K. Rowling writes, (please J.K., please) if she ever does. I strongly feel, as prolific a writer as Stephen King is, his true gift to the world is On Writing.
However, there were a few pages in On Writing that were difficult for me to read. Very, very difficult. I was not yet ready to even admit I had a problem, when in reality, I had already hit my bottom. And I didn’t finally get and stay sober for another four years after The Naked Truth self-publishing fiasco. But, squirming uncomfortably through the passages in On Writing where Stephen King details his early bent towards drinking, followed by his descent into drugs, while still drinking, is harrowing for someone without a substance abuse problem, let alone a drunk like myself. I would say that reading of his wife’s intervention/ultimatum and his subsequent recovery planted a seed. And I would hazard a guess he planted many seeds in many writers who were struggling with addiction.
He debunks, with beautiful bluntness, “one of the great pop-cultural myths of our time” that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined: “Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn’t drink because they were creative, alienated or morally weak. They drank because it is what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we are puking in the gutter.” p.92, On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
Fast forward six years to the creation of Soul Cloud, my National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) “winner” - a 50,000 word first draft of a speculative fiction novel in which I model the protagonist after my teenage son, and the protagonist’s parents, after my son’s parents. Who are me and his dad. Who are recovering alcoholics, both in fiction, and in life. Although Soul Cloud has been sulking under my bed for the past two years, I recently pulled it back out, and I love how, in the opening paragraph, I was able to connect our recovery to Charlie’s narrative: “I am the piece of shit at the center of the Universe, but people call me Charlie. My mom and dad, the Gelmans, are in a twelve step program of recovery, and my mom says you have to say what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now. I may be the only seventeen year old at SuckAss High School to have never taken a drug or a drink, but yeah, I am recovering from shit you wouldn’t believe. But it is true. All of it. Cuz you can’t make this crud up.”
Thanks, Stephen King, for planting the seed that led me to sobriety, and back to writing. Cuz you can’t make this crud up.
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