The Experience of Being Invisible

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 belittle the craft have never tried it.

Jack London famously said that you had to pursue inspiration with a cudgel. I wonder if Jack London worked a job that kept him in the office from six a.m. to seven p.m. Monday through Friday? I carry my cudgel with me, just in case.

I have a friend who works in New York City. He tells me that it is a city full of invisible men and women. Maybe 8 million people can ignore one another. What about the 24 million of Shanghai?

A while back I queried an agent about my last finished novel. I had an auto-response and have heard not a peep since. You can’t seem to get anywhere in the writing world without an agent. Even to agents, however, you can be invisible.

I can’t count the number of hours I’ve spent writing. Apart from that which is necessary for work, I suspect the greatest part of my waking hours have been spent behind either the paper or the keyboard. And someday I hope that the first door will crack open, that first novel appear.

First novels are like the breach in a dike. Once the water gets through, there’s no putting it back. Let it wash away the 100,000 words. If nothing else, a catastrophic flood is incapable of being ignored.

Comments

Dusty

My, this thing is dusty. My fans—hi, Mom!—perhaps believe me to have perished in the pandemic. No, it was nonfiction’s fault. Since the pandemic began I’ve had two nonfiction books published and have written a third. With a nine-to-five job something’s got to give. Unfortunately it’s been fiction. Well, the groundhog didn’t see his shadow yesterday, so it must be safe to come out. I shuffled away the rejection notes and began submitting again. I’ve got a backlog of weird stories and maybe some new publishers have emerged? The thing is, don’t you just hate it when you’re in the mood to submit and some lit journal has its window for submissions firmly shut? My last story, “ The Hput, ” was published about three years ago. Oh, I’ve submitted since then, but with no traction. Well, it is winter. I’ve got a lot of stories lined up. I’ve been sending them out again, dreaming of making a dime at what I love doing best...

Creative Righting

Rejection of my writing is a rejection of my imaginative world. That’s why I was cheered by the acceptance of one of my stories this week. That makes number 31. I’ve been working on a lot of fiction lately, even as nonfiction book number 6 is going to press. The ideas are still there, and bizarre as ever, but publishing venues just aren’t welcoming. The other day I had lunch with a professor whose wife is also a professor. She just had her first novel published, and so he pointed me to her indie publisher. I went to their website to learn that they’re closed to submissions. I have to admit that my latest accepted story, “Creative Writing Club,” was probably given the green light because I know the editor. That seems like a pretty dicey way to get any notice, doesn’t it? You have to know the right people even in the low circulation world. My fiction is difficult to classify. It’s got speculative elements to it. ...

Patterns

There’s a pattern I’m noticing. For fiction publishers. Even if you aim low you’ll find it a struggle. Part of the reason is the pattern. Lots of websites list publishers. The smaller, hungrier presses either eventually close or get to a place where they require an agent to get in. That’s the kiss of death. Although my stories have won prizes, and been nominated for prizes, I can’t get an agent interested. I’ve queried well over a hundred, so the agent route is one of diminishing returns. This too is a pattern. Back to the smaller presses. I check many lists. What I write, you see, is highly idiosyncratic. It’s literary but it’s weird. Publishers don’t know what to do with it. If a smaller press published stuff like this, I’d find it. The pattern includes writers who never get discovered. Ironically, a number of editors of fiction literary magazines (mostly online) tell me they enjoy my wor...

K. Marvin Bruce

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