K. Marvin Bruce

Sometimes I fear my imagination might run out.  Throughout my life it has been my experience that good things tend to run out while bad things seem to exist in amazing reserves.  Imagination is a good thing. Part of the problem, admittedly, is the ubiquity of work.  Trudging back and forth to the office each day drains a writer of energy.  At least this writer.  When I’m in the midst of a big project (as one of the six novels I’ve finished) I’m full of ideas, ready to write constantly.  When I finish, I can go months groping about for an idea that works.  Meanwhile I work. I was glad to read Tod Davies’ The Lizard Princess because it takes place in a fantasy land of ideas.  Although I’ve termed some of my stories fantasies, the fact is I don’t really write in this genre.  I think “magical realism” might be the more appropriate way to describe my work, or “fabulism.”  Genres can be constraining. The Lizard Princess makes no...

My writing partner Elizabeth and I like to talk about characters.  In some of my stories the characters are only vaguely defined.  To me, that is one of the aspects of short stories.  Did Poe know or care where Roderick  Usher went to college?  What kind of tree the raven's nest was in?  Somehow I doubt it. Still, getting a clear idea of character helps a story immensely.  One of the most basic aspects of character is desire.  We all want something.  If a character doesn't want anything no pitfalls will come on the way to her or his goals. The character's world will be dull and meandering. If there is one thing you must know about your characters, it is what do they want? I've read books where the author clearly doesn't know what the character desires.  The story can unfold and interesting, titillating events can transpire.  You can even feel for the losses or injuries the protagonist bears.  But you...

The old adage says, "don't judge a book by its cover."  In actual fact, you can tell quite a bit by even a glimpse at the cover of a book.  Publishers put quite extensive resources into getting the cover right because people do, and should, consider the cover. First of all, a cover can tell you whether a book is serious or not.  Even as fiction writers, we want people to know whether our work is deadly serious or light-hearted.  The cover is the first clue. Book covers can also tell you if the publisher knows what they are doing or not.  Many self-published books are evident by their covers.  Others tell you that the publisher doesn't understand the intended readership. Consider a book, fiction or non, that has an actual person's face on it.  Often this is not a strong selling point.  Some biographies do this, and that may be the one case where a good subject photo works for the cover.  A poor one, however, can put readers ...

I have friends who are writers.  Almost all of them have other jobs, and most of them aren’t published.  Writing, however, is what drives them.  You can tell that about a writer. Our society has condemned itself over and over again, and one of the ways in which it continues to do so is by blocking writers from publication.  Even many of those “successful” in the art will say it was a matter of luck.  They found the right person at the right time in a threadbare saga that nobody would publish these days. Meanwhile, our society makes it increasingly difficult to get published and the real writers muddle through careers that are, in reality, just jobs. I’m not talking about weekend warriors here—people who write on the spur of the moment and try to get attention for it.  Writing is living for writers.  People who have the immediate response of “I should write about that” to even the most mundane thing that can be made extraordinary with words...

Writers can be suspicious people.  I am related to a somewhat famous author.  He won’t talk about writing and never offers to give any help.  I figured it was just a personality trait. You see, I’m a pretty open and honest guy.  Well, as much as a writer can be.  I’m glad to talk about writing and share the paltry bit I know.  Thus I started this blog.  I’m finding that not many others share this trait with me. I knew an editor who was younger than me.  I’m not exactly wet behind the ears, I have to admit.  So this younger editor was, I suppose, a little suspicious of this older guy who contacted him out of the blue.  Still, he took my card and said he’d be in touch. Deep down I suspected he might be a writer.  I have no idea what he thought of me.  After he left his company to go off on his own, I contacted him and asked if he’d like to talk about writing.  Silence.  Not a word. You have to understan...

I seldom get sick.  I’ve been told this is one of the boons of middle age—the maladies of childhood pass and it take more to bring you down.  A swift-moving bug, however, recently caught me and kept me awake all night thinking the end had come. Ironically, I associate being sick with writing.  I was  a sickly child.  Skinny and frail I ended up in the hospital with pneumonia and actually missed a large portion of seventh grade because of recurring bouts of illness.  I attempted to write my first novel in such a febrile state. A science-fiction fan, I began scrawling about a ship at sea attached by some weird creature.  My novel didn’t have much of a plot and my skills were, well, juvenile.  A couple more false starts accompanied me through high school, but few people beyond my two closest friends, knew I wrote. Of course, I don’t have to be sick to write.  In this workaday world, however, a brief illness affords an opportun...

With a shock I realized it had been months since the last time.  Months!  I write every day, and yet I hadn’t submitted anything for publication since the spring.  I had several stories ready to go, and although my skin is getting more reptilian, each rejection still hurts (nobody’s allowed to say that, by the way). A couple weeks back, then, I took three stories that have been gathering electronic dust, and sent them out.  The first, a prose riff on Whitman called, “O Driver, My Driver,” was turned down by a journal that had published me twice before.  I’m incredibly busy so I just took the pain and went to work. A decided to send it out again—it really is a good story.  I will discuss it more, once it’s published.  That’s why I started this blog.  Long ago a friend warned me not to try to publish fiction on a blog.  Of course, some people do, and become best sellers. Did I say it’s going to be published?  Oh yes, thank you...

Movies are stories.  Of course, many movies are based on the work of writers in the form of novels or, sometimes, short stories.  Borrowing the plot, a director and screenwriter take over and retell the story visually.  Often the original written form is better. Serial television shows are the same.  Since writers of television programs can’t know season-by-season whether their program will be renewed, it has to be, almost by definition, open-ended.  When a new season begins a character may have shifted or become someone else, and we, the viewers must play along. My current television story is Sleepy Hollow .  It is very different, of course, than the tale written by Washington Irving.  By the end of season one, even, it was clear that the writers had changed their minds as to who some of the characters were.  Henry Parrish was not originally the horseman of war. I have no way of knowing that, but as a writer I can sense it.  As ...