K. Marvin Bruce

Is it possible to write too much?  I remember asking a famous scholar once about something he had written.  He couldn’t remember it.  In his defense he said, “You know, you write so much.” I’m not a young man, and I think I’m finally starting to see what he meant.  In addition to this blog, I write another under my actual name.  I’ve been doing for about six years.  The other day I recalled a somewhat funny thing I’d written (or so it seemed to me) but I couldn’t find it. I tried searching the blog with every possible keyword I could imagine.  Nothing helped.  I couldn’t remember what I was writing about, or even the exact wording of the phrase.  It was a powerful image, though, and I wanted to find it.  Even in these days of “lasers in the jungle” you can’t find a phrase when you need to. Maybe the problem is I write too much.  I write every day.  I pretty much have since I was a teenager.  My advice to...

A rare day off work.  What to do?   I have been writing fiction since I was in middle school.  There was a hiatus of maybe a decade and a half during which I was learning “higher education” ways of expressing myself.  But the call to fiction was too strong to ignore. One of the most influential people in my life was a teacher whom I never had in class.  He was the faculty advisor to the creative writing club.  In high school he urged me to try to publish my work, but publication was too scary a step, and I didn’t know how.  Fact is, I still don’t.  Only now I’m old enough that that doesn’t stop me. Mr. Milliken said that the key to writing was constancy.  Write at least fifteen minutes a day.  In some form or other, I’ve been doing that for decades.  I realized on my day off that I had dozens of stories half-finished, some of which I couldn’t remember writing.  I also had dozens finished that I have never tried to ...