K. Marvin Bruce

  Rejection of my writing is a rejection of my imaginative world.   That’s why I was cheered by the acceptance of one of my stories this week.   That makes number 31. I’ve been working on a lot of fiction lately, even as nonfiction book number 6 is going to press.   The ideas are still there, and bizarre as ever, but publishing venues just aren’t welcoming. The other day I had lunch with a professor whose wife is also a professor.   She just had her first novel published, and so he pointed me to her indie publisher.   I went to their website to learn that they’re closed to submissions.   I have to admit that my latest accepted story, “Creative Writing Club,” was probably given the green light because I know the editor.   That seems like a pretty dicey way to get any notice, doesn’t it?   You have to know the right people even in the low circulation world. My fiction is difficult to classify.   It’s got speculative elements to it.   ...

I’ve been a bad boy.  I haven’t been posting on my poor, neglected blog lately.  You see, like all truly creative types, I’ve been protesting. Call me simplistic, but I always thought America was about freedom.  I grew up writing fantastic (as in wild, unusual, not as in great) stories and nobody said anything I wrote was threatening.  I didn’t know any better—I was just a boy with a tablet and a pencil.  I wrote my imagination. Now we have a president who’s trying to slash the National Endowment for the Humanities.  There’s no profit in it, you see.  And this after having W say just a few years back that freedom isn’t free.  What?  You have to pay for freedom?  Forgive me, but I’ve always been a live and let live kind of guy. My horror isn’t gruesome.  It’s existential.  Maybe that’s why I have such a tough time getting published.  With nearly twenty stories in press I hope my writing’s not that bad.  I ...

Can creativity be taught?  I’m not sure, but it certainly can be cultivated.  My friend Steve recommended Edward de Bono’s book Lateral Thinking .  I see it was published several decades ago, but it has me thinking about thinking. We are encouraged, indeed, compelled by logic to follow a linear, or in de Bono’s words, vertical approach to thinking.  One of the characteristics of this structure is that each step along the way must be unerringly right for the next step to work. Creativity, de Bono insists, uses both vertical thinking and lateral thinking.  Lateral thinking is the process of withholding judgment so that numerous alternatives might be considered.  No matter how irrational. De Bono isn’t writing particularly for writers.  His book was for teachers, primarily of younger students, giving them suggestions and exercises to increase lateral thinking ability.  While not everything might apply, some key aspects of his approach re...

My young writing partner Elizabeth often used to ask me if she was writing something the right way.  I responded that there is no right way to write.  Sure, there are rules and conventions that help more often than not, but when it comes to writing, you do what comes natural. I can’t know, but I suspect, this is one of the reasons it is so difficult to get published these days.  I do know publishing professionals, and they all say that publishers want works “like” those of a best selling author.  As close to a sure thing as a publisher can get. True creativity, however, blazes trails.  I enjoy fiction that I have a difficult time classifying.  Genres, after all, are guidelines to help us categorize written works.  Sometimes, however, the categories just don’t match the reality. I often write by phrases.  Phrases come to me—often at the worst possible time—that seem to be the basis for a story.  Phrase gets added to phrase, light ...