K. Marvin Bruce

The search for an agent is entering its fourth month and I often wonder just what classics we’d have to live without if Herman Melville or Charlotte Bronte had received email after email saying “it just doesn’t have that ‘have to have’ feeling.”   We’d be literary beggars. The true irony of this is I know people who work in the publishing industry.   They say that someone with my background should be a no-brainer for an agent.   When I was a young man a friend accused me of writing too much like Melville.   “Nobody writes like that anymore,” he said.   His father-in-law was a writer. Melville was friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne.   Their works are endlessly remade in a more modern idiom.   Electrum may look like gold, but it’s not the same.   Why not search for the real thing? People learn how to do things from watching the masters.   While it may have been the glib Doc Savage and Dark Shadows pulps that led me to reading, I soon...

Ten percent, in the context of the Bible, is a tithe.  The old laws say that you owe God ten percent of your income.  Some religious people today still pay it. I was reading an article recently that featured another ten percent.  This applied to writers.  Although an unscientific survey—including information from Duotrope—this article suggested the acceptance rate of fiction writers is ten percent. That means, and I’m no math guy, that a piece has to be submitted an average of ten times before it is accepted somewhere.  This helps explain, but not assuage, my lack of success when it comes to getting published.  It’s normal. This has been on my mind lately since  Interview with the Gorgon  is getting more than ripe.  I stopped trying to find publishers some five years ago when it was under contract with Vagabondage Press.  They took a long time killing it—with no kill fee—leaving me in ...

Sometimes work gets in the way of life.  Although I manage to write for a few minutes every day, sometimes I’m so distracted that the words are sluggish, like heavily polluted water.  At such times, I rely on other authors to help me through. I recently read Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train .  I wasn’t sure what to expect because I try not to read reviews before I start a book.  To be honest, I don’t often read bestsellers.  Still, as I’ve come to realize, if I want people to read what I write, I have to write like what people read. It’s no accident, I suppose, that my favorite writers are often people who’ve struggled while they were alive.  Struggled either making it in general, or struggled to be recognized in their writing.  Ignored by the mainstream, they became classics after they died. The Girl on the Train is a fast read, and the story is well told.  Rachel makes a great unreliable narrator.  Still, I had the sense, ...

A brand new notebook.  It's a thing of such exquisite beauty that I begin to weep.  The pen in my hand is nervous, like a first date.  Once I begin to write, this notebook will never be the same. The ideas flow, partly based on the medium chosen to channel them.  Any writer knows this.   Growing up before word processors or home computers, in a time when even typewriters were too expensive for families like mine, I came to adore paper.  In almost a mystical sense, I feel a growing thrill when faced with completely blank pages.  Writing can be so visceral, so physical.  I can get lost in it, as if I'm following the folds in my gray matter to places I never knew I had.   The results, whether any publishers like them or not, prove that I am a writer.  I have gone some place unexplored and have brought something new to light.  It may not survive.  No museum may want it.  It is, however, now part of the universe.   ...

Have you ever noticed that on the days when you desperately need a bit of good news—when you’re viscerally aching for it—these are the days literary magazines send their faceless rejection letters?  The universe is tilted against us. I wrote a piece that looked perfect for The Literary Commute .  It was about commuting, and it was very literary.  Even made subtle reference to Whitman, taking his poem in a direction he wouldn’t want it to go. Even though The Literary Commute is new, they sent me a rejection letter on a Monday, a day of direst need.  I would say I’ve lost count of how many journals have rejected my work, but that would be a lie.  I read enough to know that it is nearly every writer’s story. I had a professor once who said, in paraphrase, “If you’re work is good enough for some people to like, it will be good enough for others to hate.”  It seems the haters outdistance the lovers by a considerable margin. Probably the...

A few years ago my writing partner Elizabeth pointed me to the website “I Write Like” ( iwl.me ).  As I mentioned in my last post, I don’t emulate anyone in particular, but, like most writers I pick up some traits of those I read. Back when I first tried I Write Like, it was hardly surprising that its first answer was H. P. Lovecraft.  I’d been reading a lot of Lovecraft at the time, and I sent in a sizable sample of my writing.  Oh, and it also suggested Stephen King. Elizabeth tried it and also came up with Stephen King, despite the fact that her writing was, at the time, young adult and geared towards talking cats.  Perhaps Mr. King has written so much that it is hard not to sound like him? I’ve written thousands and thousands of words since I last visited the website.  Not really sure I’d still find it available, I was pleased to see it there.  I’ve been experiencing a reading malaise, and I needed to recharge my dry cells. Copying seve...

Writing keeps me sane.  Writing drives me insane.  Often the only stability that I have in a tortured world is my writing.  Of course, writing doesn’t pay.  Long ago I made myself a note inside the cover of my commonplace book: “whether published or not, I am a writer.” A factor that is difficult to include in this equation is depression.  Like many writers I live in a miasma of low-grade depression much of the time.  It even fuels my art.  I write my most humorous material when I am despondent.  There is a depression that is debilitating, however, and even causes writing to become a strain. “There is a wisdom that is woe,” Herman Melville wrote, “but there is a woe that is madness.”  Yes, Herman, I have been there with you.  At times it is so dark that I can only glimpse Poe or Lovecraft as my guides, distantly ahead.  In the twilight we find each other. Since being released from my contract with Vagabondage Pre...

No writer really works in isolation.  Although my favorite time of writing falls daily between 3:30 and 5:00 a.m., I am not alone.  In my head are the many other writers I’ve read, and those from whom I’ve learned my penurious craft.  Today marks the birthday of Franz Kafka, one of my literary heroes. My experience of trying to find publishers has been a kafkaesque trial from time to time.  I learned to write by reading those who’ve written before—Poe, Melville, Austin, Kafka.  Their rich writing, it seems, had a place in a past that no longer exists. Something few editors appreciate is the metaphorical and ironic style of writing I employ.  Anyone who reads Moby-Dick and comes away thinking it is a novel about whaling has no subtlety whatsoever.  To write about life’s great questions, you need a vehicle.  Melville chose a whale, and Kafka chose a bug.  Today, unless your style is flashy and full of sparkly panache, you’ll remain s...