A Tale of Two Novels

Early in my professional life, I experienced emotional trauma at the hands of my employer. Many years later the pain is still so vivid that I have tried to deal with like any writer would: by penning a novel about it.

The first attempt, while still not abandoned completely, ended up sounding too self-pitying. A friend of mine with an MFA told me that many students elect to use biographical novels as their thesis. I want the story to be profound, and funny, and not so dreadful. I began revising it recently, but put it back down.

The second attempt was to make it all a metaphor. This led to 75,000 words that didn’t have a strong center. These words lack the cohesion of painful narrative, but they do contain some very nice writing.

I revisited that novel recently. There may be hope for it. Novel writing draws on personal experience. These two novels are not among the six I’ve completed. Both are sufficient, length-wise, to qualify as novels already—they meet Nanowrimo standards (novel number three was a Nanowrimo exercise). I go back and forth between them to deal with the angst.

Self-pity is natural. I would say that those who suffer deserve to explore self-pity, but the public won’t buy it. Pull up your socks, hitch up your goddam britches and get back to it. Buck up or shut up.

Novels are supposed to help us deal with our human experiences. So I’ve been told. Only some human experiences—professional failure, loss of self-worth, depression—have no place in fiction. Get mad. Get some weapons. Blow some people away. People will buy that.

My experience, however, was more profound than that. It delves deeply into the human condition. I suppose most of my stories, once you get past the surface, do. Finding those who want to share that experience is rare. Don’t mind me, I’m just feeling sorry for myself.

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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. ...

Creativity

Maybe you’ve noticed this too. When you step away from fiction writing for a while, your creativity becomes flaccid. I’ve had to step away from this blog for a while because I was writing my sixth nonfiction book. God, I’ve missed fiction! Now that I’ve entered that phase of waiting for publishers to respond, I’ve turned my limited writing time back to fiction. I submitted a couple of stories this week and am waiting to hear about those as well. When you’re a writer, waiting is a way of life. Opening my software where I store my fiction stories, I was amazed by how many I found. Some of them are bad—so bad that they’ll never (rightfully) be published. Some are surprisingly good and have been sitting around while I finished up my nonfic. The vast majority, however, are unfinished. Some years back I realized that when I’m writing in the heat of inspiration but don’t have time to finish a story that I need to write down where I...

K. Marvin Bruce

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