K. Marvin Bruce

A rare day off work.  What to do?   I have been writing fiction since I was in middle school.  There was a hiatus of maybe a decade and a half during which I was learning “higher education” ways of expressing myself.  But the call to fiction was too strong to ignore. One of the most influential people in my life was a teacher whom I never had in class.  He was the faculty advisor to the creative writing club.  In high school he urged me to try to publish my work, but publication was too scary a step, and I didn’t know how.  Fact is, I still don’t.  Only now I’m old enough that that doesn’t stop me. Mr. Milliken said that the key to writing was constancy.  Write at least fifteen minutes a day.  In some form or other, I’ve been doing that for decades.  I realized on my day off that I had dozens of stories half-finished, some of which I couldn’t remember writing.  I also had dozens finished that I have never tried to ...

As the author of six novels (none published) Banned Book Week, which begins tomorrow, always has a special appeal.  People have been writing for over four thousand years, and it might seem that there’s little left to say that won’t offend someone.  So I celebrated Banned Book Week with abandon. There’s no official “western canon” of banned books.  Suffice it to say that if you have a favorite, it’s probably on somebody’s list.  Although we gladly watch televisions shows frothing over with sex and violence, if you try to put it in a book, someone will object.  Loudly. Many cultural heroes, of the literary sort, have spent a stint or two on the banned book lists.  We feel that our children shouldn’t read such things.  They might act out the violence or adult situations and who’s going to clean up after all that?  It is easier to prevent them reading. I recall RIF.  Reading Is Fundamental.  It was a program in full swing when I...

I admire the courage of anyone who publishes fiction.  As a sometime writer of the same, I know that, should anyone read my paltry offerings, I open myself to criticism and critique.  It’s a bit of me on each page I scribble. Still, often I read material that makes me cringe.  Tips from writers who succeeded tell us what to avoid, yet some fiction writers still seem unaware.  Novels full of cliches, telling—not showing, and telling yet again, over-written and lacking subtlety make their way into my hands.  I want to bury my eyes in a box of salt. But there are virtues in such reading.  Perhaps the greatest is that poor writing reminds me that I don’t know how my work appears to others.  I recently read a novel that tried me sorely.  I realized as I read, however, that I was learning on each page. Many of us learn to write by reading good writers.  If we read enough, we take on the successful habits of our idols.  Their caden...