K. Marvin Bruce

As a writer, I know that creativity begets creativity.  Since I only discuss my pseudonymous writing with a few friends, I have to experience creative intercourse elsewhere as well.  Reading, of course.  But old movies sometimes help. Movies are stories.  A friend was once surprised when I mentioned movies as an intellectual pursuit.  They can be that, but they can also be a fairly quick way to digest a story.  Reading a novel will take, generally, several days.  A movie a couple of hours. Why old movies?  I do like current movies.  Some of them can be thought-provoking, such as The Matrix, or any of the Planet of the Apes franchise.  Still, old movies often rely on good writing.  Special effects couldn’t substitute for lack of story in the old days. For example, I watched Casablanca at the suggestion of my friend Steve.  I was struck not only by how many classic lines it had, but by the fact that the dialogue w...

Movies are stories.  Of course, many movies are based on the work of writers in the form of novels or, sometimes, short stories.  Borrowing the plot, a director and screenwriter take over and retell the story visually.  Often the original written form is better. Serial television shows are the same.  Since writers of television programs can’t know season-by-season whether their program will be renewed, it has to be, almost by definition, open-ended.  When a new season begins a character may have shifted or become someone else, and we, the viewers must play along. My current television story is Sleepy Hollow .  It is very different, of course, than the tale written by Washington Irving.  By the end of season one, even, it was clear that the writers had changed their minds as to who some of the characters were.  Henry Parrish was not originally the horseman of war. I have no way of knowing that, but as a writer I can sense it.  As ...

I recently read a zombie novel.  That’s not entirely true.  I recently finished a zombie novel that I had been reading since last autumn.  Maybe late summer. Monster books have always been among my guilty pleasures.  The monstrous captures the imagination like no other topic, filling me with boyish thrills, frissons of possibilities unimagined.  I read vampire novels (drawing the line at Twilight) and werewolf books, when they can be found, are even better. Zombies, however, just don’t seem to work for me.   It’s not that I have anything against zombies.  My first piece of published fiction was a zombie story.  The problem isn’t the topic, but the suspension of reality.  Zombies are believable enough.  In my story the zombie identity isn’t revealed until the end.  There’s a reason for that. In a novel, where the story stretches on over many, many pages, your rational mind creeps in and thinks, this is impossib...