K. Marvin Bruce

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...

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-wis...

While The Passion of the Titans will be my first published novel—something about which I’m very excited—it is far from the first novel I’ve written.  It comes in at number four.  Nestled between my master’s degree and doctorate was my first completed novel.  Written while I was largely unemployed, trying to help my new wife make ends meet, I plunked out a clunker that I only ever very briefly considered sending out to publishers.  I’ve still got a copy somewhere. I find that it is important to keep copies of even failed writing attempts. My first attempted novel dates back to about seventh grade.  I was a sickly child and while home from school with one bout of flu or another, I began writing a somewhat developed, multi-chapter story.  As a somewhat more mature writer, years later I ripped the pages in half in embarrassment.  As an even more mature writer, years later I taped them back together. I began work in ernest on a novel while teachi...