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. When you’ve been writing for half a century, you l

The Same Old Story

After a story is rejected from a literary magazine—a rather frequent occurrence—I always revise it. For stories rejected half a dozen or more times—a rather frequent occurrence—the stories can shift substantially. In a version of the old saw that “this is the axe used by George Washington to chop down the cherry tree; it has had five new handles and three new heads,” I wonder if the story is the same after such revision. I write in the flush of inspiration. The story comes to me roughly complete. The literati say “no,” and I assume the fault must be my own. I knuckle down and start trying to revise to their liking. The action changes. The ending changes. The characters change. Is it the same story? Is the fault that my addled brain seems to have trouble telling a story someone wants to read? Is it the curse of an internet that makes writers of anyone with fingers to type? I started writing fiction four decades ago. If I’d tried to start publishing then, perhap

Makes the Wold Go Round

It’s all about the money. As any real writer knows, we write because we’re compelled to. I suspect it’s only after someone tastes success that s/he gets cynical enough to write for money. That doesn’t stop agents and publishers from trying, though. My Medusa novel was under contract with a publisher. This was about five years ago. After dallying around for a couple of years, the publisher cancelled the contract because the editor who’d signed it up had left the press. That’s hardly a legitimate reason; in fact, it defeats the purpose of a book contract all together. I’ve not been able to find another publisher since. Nearly every rejection letter says something along the lines of “It’s well written, but it’s not for us.” They mean they don’t see enough dollar signs. I’m not naive—I get it. I would, however, appreciate just a little compensation for the hundreds and hundreds of hours I put into my writing. Self-publishing is too much work on top of work. There

K. Marvin Bruce

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