K. Marvin Bruce

I’ve got a bandage on my thumb.  It’s because of my overweening love of books.  To write well one must read even better.  Then the book stacks begin to grow. I head to the basement.  I used to live in a four-bedroom house, but it was owned by the institution that intimated my services were no longer required.  After that I’ve moved to a succession of two-bedroom apartments and all that implies. In the basement lie my dormant power tools and scraps of wood.  Back when we lived in “the house” my basement buzzed with the making of cheap, pine furniture.  Mostly bookshelves.  Here in the apartment the basement is shared and space is at a premium.  Some people don’t like finding sawdust all over their stuff. The result has been stacks of books growing up beside the existing shelves.  I don’t mind that so much, since a background of books is always visually interesting.  But then I went to get a book from the bottom of ...

Creativity, as we who write know, begets creativity.  I was reminded of this by having lunch with another writer in New York City.  I use “writer” intentionally since major publishers have studiously avoided both of us, but we carry on, nonetheless. New York has no dearth of writers’ groups and workshops and seminars.  They work best for those who live in the city (unlike yours truly) and who have some spare cash (also unlike yours truly).  Still, meeting with other creatives is what makes our work work. Like the vast majority of writers, I work for a living.  My job, with the added commute, takes up about 90 percent of every waking hour of the work week.  My time for writing adds up to less than five hours per Monday-through-Friday, a pretty sad statistic.  Meeting with other writers has even less than that. Using a nom de plume , I suppose, doesn’t help.  Some of my writer colleagues know who K. Marvin Bruce is, but most do not....

Writing is a lonely activity.  The end goal is often community, though.  You exchange the loneliness for a book deal and lots of people read your work.  In theory.  For those who don’t get published, is the loneliness for nothing? To me, writing is its own reward.  It is a crying shame that other people won’t read it, but it is my personal cry against being forgotten.  I don’t hang out with friends, so read my writing. The world’s a busy place with work demanding it’s 99 percent of flesh and little time is left besides to do what one wants.  Weekends are for errands.  Or friends.  Or writing. Writing for me is all about generating friends.  I’m a nice guy—you’ll have to take my word for that, but it’s true—but I’m also shy.  I watch other people.  I write about what I see.  What I imagine happens among friends. The results may not be sparkly, but I notice the grit on the sidewalk shines too.  I’ve alw...

The best advice writers give aspiring writers is this: read.  Read a lot.  The thing about our species is that we learn by watching what others do.  To write is to read. Thing is, I’m an eclectic reader.  And my writing, like a snowball, grows from contact with other words.  I read literary fiction, I write literary fiction.  I read horror, I write horror.  I read humor, I write humor.  My promiscuous reading leads to the sin of eclectic writing. How do I know it’s a sin?  The editors tell me so.  The great priestly gatekeepers who hold the means of recognition in their genre-stained hands.  Nobody knows what to make of the cross-genre man.  The transgender are fine.  Encouraged even.  But beware the cross-genre man. As I go sinning across the internet, reading a little of this and a little of that, the snowman I’m building starts to look maybe a bit like that of Pig Pen.  Did I mention I read childr...