K. Marvin Bruce

Psychologists, I’ve read, have come to doubt Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s fives stages of death and dying.  Writers, it seems to me, know quite a bit about these topics, and they hold true to my experience.  I may not be typical in having so little time to write, but I do emote. So the latest literary agent has turned down my once accepted, and multiply-rejected Boeotian Rhapsody for publication.  I can’t believe it (stage one) at first.  The agent’s description seemed to match my genre so well.  Sometimes just opening email is a shock. Why is this so damned hard?  A number—very small, admittedly, but a number nevertheless—of short fiction publishers like my work.  They don’t publish books, of course.  Still, why can’t anybody give me a chance?  I guess I’m at stage two. I consider writing back to the agent.  Maybe making my case.  This, however, is the kiss of death in publishing.  Agents like quick, clean, and no com...

Writing a whole novel is difficult.  I've finished five and am nearly done with six.  Seven is almost half-way there. A friend who is a successful writer says, "Write 100,000 words, and throw them away.  Then you're a writer." Personally, I passed that benchmark long ago, maybe even before the invention of computers to mock me with the fact.  But you kind of get used to being out of sight. Consider the invisible man. In the nineteenth century, it seems, publishers were starved for material.  They would publish anything relatively good, just by dint of it being finished.  Today publishers are obese and lazy.  Prone to overlook really excellent writing, because it doesn't bring in enough free lunches. Writing novels, in my experience, means spending hundreds and hundreds of hours going over and re-going over story lines for inconsistency, begging muses to sleep with you, and awaking even more frustrated than you fell asleep. Those who belitt...