In the earliest days of his writing career, John McCaffrey of Wainscott wasn’t composing short stories or chapters in a novel. He was writing cheeky inscriptions in classmates’ yearbooks in Rochester, where he grew up, and scrawling impromptu poems on bar napkins for friends during his college days at Villanova University.
It would still be years before he actually took a creative writing course. By the time he finally signed up for an eight-week adult education program at the 63rd Street Y in New York City, he’d been quietly writing what he described as “little stories for myself.” He’d also been trying to build a copywriting career “like Dick Van Dyke,” he said, “but that didn’t work out.”
At the end of that writing course at the Y, the teacher encouraged him to keep writing. “She came to me and said, ‘I think you have a little something,’ ” Mr. McCaffrey recalled.
So he kept writing. He began studying it formally as a graduate student at City College of New York, taking night classes while working as a grant writer during the day.
Fast-forward to today: Mr. McCaffrey is the author of three short story collections, including “Two Syllable Men” in 2016, and a dystopian novel published in 2013, “The Book of Ash.” He is also a teacher of online creative writing courses as an adjunct professor at Rochester Institute of Technology.
Then, fast-forward a bit more to a date that hasn’t even happened yet: Dec. 14 at LTV Studios in Wainscott. For the Playwrights Theatre of East Hampton, Mr. McCaffrey and a collaborator, Jack Gwaltney, will present an original play based on the classic Charles Dickens protagonist. Its title: “Scrooge . . . The Relapse,” in turn based on a short story called “Scrooge in Psychotherapy” that Mr. McCaffrey wrote a few years back. An earlier version of the play was presented in 2018 at Guild Hall.
Not unlike Gregory Maguire’s treatment of L. Frank Baum’s Wicked Witch of the West, which ultimately became a smash hit on Broadway and an even smash-ier feature film out in theaters now, Mr. McCaffrey has reinvented Scrooge (again). In this new take, the rehabilitated miser falls back into his old habits.
“The ghosts showed him his folly and he comes out of it, but I think it’s a manic fit,” Mr. McCaffrey said. “It’s classic bipolarity, and in my little world, he comes out of it and he’s miserable again. He goes back to being miserable, and Marley comes back. He sends three new visions — he sends Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin.”
“I was reading them when I wrote it,” Mr. McCaffrey admits.
The ultimate goal is to publish “Scrooge . . . The Relapse” so that it can be picked up and performed at regional theaters. “I think it could do that. It’s fun, and I think it’s got a good message,” Mr. McCaffrey said. “It’s dark and funny, and it honors Dickens. The core thing is, can people change overnight? And you know what? I don’t think so.”
It’s not Mr. McCaffrey’s first foray into theatrical performance. In July, he curated a selection of maritime-themed original works by local writers, called “Sea Stories,” that were read and performed by the writers themselves, among them William Norwich.
Like all good writers, Mr. McCaffrey has encountered those stretches of seemingly hopeless days when it’s hard to string together words into sentences that make sense. In other words, writer’s block.
“I do this thing where if I’m in a tough stretch of time — life can be a pain in the ass — I don’t want to lose my muscle, so I try to move back into the muscle by doing small word counts every day,” he said. “I hit on how many words a day could I write — 250 words. It’s exactly what I can do. I would write 250 words a day, and I wrote three stories that summer using that method — I would stop at 250 even if I was grooving — and I think they’re the best three I ever wrote.”
As for genre, his work “is usually magical realism. One of my last collections has two stories about bears that talk. My comedy is usually surreal, not totally based in reality.”
But he can also get serious, as he did in his “Two Syllable Men” collection.
“Each title is a guy’s name of two syllables. They’re broken,” said Mr. McCaffrey, who had just gone through a divorce when they were initially written. “A friend of mine said, ‘Are you done yet? Did you get it out of your system?’ But I liked it. It’s really about the fracture, and trying to heal a loss.”
Mr. McCaffrey owes a lot to writers like Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene in terms of influence and inspiration. His all-time favorite author is W. Somerset Maugham. “He’s got the cleanest, most beautiful prose I’ve ever seen,” Mr. McCaffrey said. “This is very writerly: He never has to say ‘he said, she said,’ ever. . . . He orients you. The other thing he does that I love is you never know who the central character is for a while. Why does he do this? You’re already five pages in and we’re trying to figure it out. It’s human nature. It’s a really interesting way to rope the reader in.”
Reading Maugham “threw me off. I liked it so much I literally changed the way I wrote,” he said. “I broke my swing down like a golfer. It took about a year, and it wasn’t easy, but I finally got it.”
Mr. McCaffrey’s goal is to leave the reader with a takeaway in each story he writes. “To my credit and maybe discredit with writing, I’m always trying to spin it where there is a lining — maybe not a silver lining — but I would probably never write something where there is nothing to take away,” he said. “It doesn’t make me better, but I shy away from the ugliness of things. The character can be a complete asshole, but there’s got to be something at the end where being an asshole can be helpful.”
He once gave a signed copy of “The Book of Ash” to a celebrity with whom he’d played pickup basketball. Later, Mr. McCaffrey happened to be searching his own name online and found that the Strand in New York City had a copy of his book. Curious, he went down on his lunch break to find it.
“It was downstairs where the used books are,” he said. “There are tiers of the used books. There are some that are like the ‘land of misfit toys’ and they’re $1. That’s where it was. I open it up and there’s the signature to the person.”
In addition to writing fiction and teaching college-level creative writing, Mr. McCaffrey also contributes regularly to The Good Men Project, an online publication that explores “what it means to be a good man in the 21st century.” He also edits the “50 Give or Take” series from Vine Leaves Press.
While he’s still actively writing, he acknowledges not having the same level of energy and drive he had when he was younger and more ambitious.
“I’m trying to be more me — more grounded,” Mr. McCaffrey said. “There’s something wonderful about that young sort of innocence and delusion, but I’m in a happier place with it.”
