K. Marvin Bruce

Writing a story is like turning on a flashlight in a midnight room.  The words you use describe only part of the scene.  What remains unsaid is just as important as what makes its way to the tale. Our stories are mediated approximations.  They can never express the fulness of the experience, and sometimes I wonder if the same experience is fully unique anyway.  Do I experience a sneeze the same way as you? I’ve been reading a lot of descriptive writing.  I know it’s fallen out of favor these days.  Books from before the internet describe what a person looks like, each piece of clothing, hair style, and characteristic marks.  Now just “Joe” or “Jane” will do. The sense of smell is underused in descriptive writing.  Perhaps because most people don’t pay much attention to scents, or perhaps because what you smell is far too personal to reveal.  We are animals, and like animals, we can be led by our noses. I find that the d...

An editor once told me, “sometimes the story of the author is more important than the book.”  Of course, he meant that for sales, the story of the author may be more compelling than the book itself. Many authors’ stories are fascinating.  Today it may be less so, since anyone with a keyboard and wifi access can style him- or herself as a writer.  Looking at Amazon and their number of self-published books, I wonder about the compelling stories. I read authors’ biographies from time to time.  Some are fairly conventional “so-and-so always wanted to be a writer, etc.”  but many are not.  People like Edgar Allan Poe and Edgar Rice Burroughs struggled  with personal demons all their lives. Experience comes through in stories. My best advice to authentic writers is not to major in English.  If you major in English you may learn how to publish and how to craft conventional stories.  My advice: major in life experience. Wit...

Books are a funny business.  You may have noticed that Amazon sells books for less than the cover price.  What might not be obvious is that the price of the book printed on it is a suggested retail price. A friend works in publishing.  He tells me it is unlike any other business.  For example, when publishers sell books to a wholesaler, unlike almost no other industry, they must be willing to accept returns.  If Barnes and Noble buys five hundred copies and only sells fifty, the publisher has to take the stock back and mark those sales as losses. For reasons such as this, and declining print sales, publishers have to be careful about the print run.  Too much stock costs money to warehouse, and if it doesn’t sell, it gets marked down.  These deeper discounts lead to remaindering, which is why you can find bargain books at B&N. Pricing a book is a bit of a guess.  Part of it has to do with how expensive a book is to make.  The ...

Do writing groups really help?  I believe they can.  Indeed, they must.  At work someone has started up a creative writing group.  I went to a meeting.  I felt old. Like dirty old man old.  I mean, shouldn’t somebody my age already know about publishing?  Shouldn’t I put up or shut up?  What was a guy old enough to be the father of everyone in the room to say? I’ve been part of writers’ groups before.  I joined the Liberty State Writers Group once upon a time.  I felt lost.  There were so many of them, and they all knew each other.  I’m shy, like a writer, and soon felt lost.  I stopped going before my dues ran out. I still remember one girl there.  I never knew her name.  She shyly smiled at me and said “hi” a time or two.  I bet she wrote the kinds of thing I do.  I’ll never know. More recently a joined a mostly male writerly group.  Males tend to be more aggressive, self-i...

Like many writers, I prefer longhand to keyboard composition.  There’s something natural and calming to holding a pen in one hand and head in the other, imagining away the day before a stack of paper. Like most writers I don’t have time for longhand composition.  The great nemesis of creativity—work—limits writing time to minutes a day, except on the weekends.  If I ever wish to get published, I have to do it with my hands in my lap.  (I have a laptop that serves as my ersatz brain.) Editing, in my experience, is easier on a printed manuscript.  The electronic world plays tricks on your eyes.  We have to develop the skill to read on a screen.  For over five thousand years writing was strictly hardcopy.  Now it almost never is. When my novel, The Passion of the Titans , had been accepted by Vagabondage Press, I was elated.  It has been a lifelong dream to have a novel published.  Then the clouds rolled in.  I had an emai...

There’s something about towers.  My friend Steve visited High Point State Park in New Jersey yesterday.  He posted some pictures of the tower on top of the highest spot in the state.  It looks like a cross between Monty Python and a haunted lighthouse inside. His post got me to thinking about towers.  Towers are some of the most moody locations for fiction (and some non-fiction) drama.  There’s inherent danger in a tower.  The climbing of a tower always implies threat. Fear of falling, as my writing partner Elizabeth reminds me, is evident even in young babies that haven’t learned to walk.  We fear the sudden drop. I used to watch Ghost Hunters on television.  When they visited lighthouses it was always easy to believe in a haunting.  Historically lighthouses were often isolated locations, very lonely and somber.  The thought of being trapped so far away from others suggests tragedy. One of the early, great stop-m...