K. Marvin Bruce

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, ...

I was recently reading a piece by a New York Times best-selling author.  It was a bit discouraging.  Best-sellers, he noted, are often decided on the basis of hundreds, not thousands, of sales.  The book-buying public is small. Reading, this author averred, is hard work.  Most people would rather watch TV or surf the net.  Anything but read. My friend Steve works in the publishing industry.  He told me once that studies show only about 5% of the US population buys books.  While that’s a low percent, it is a high enough number to keep the industry going.  Still, it does make it harder for writers. A publishing industry feeling stressed will try more and more for “a sure thing” rather than to take a chance on something new.  The runaway success of Andy Weir’s  The Martian and Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train —both passed by major houses as too outré until they started making money—show that editors often have no id...