K. Marvin Bruce

How many novels must one man write, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, before you can call him an author?  I’ve completed six, none published, and I’ve got another well under way.  My business card, however, nowhere indicates that I’m an author. Being a writer is more than an occupation.  It’s an identity.  Like the vast majority of writers, I work for a living.  Long hours.  Long commute.  Heavy eyelids.  Sloped shoulders.  Weary sighs.  My boss thinks of me as an employee.  I think of myself as a writer gathering information. For me, there’s an ethics about it all.  I spend a lot of time reading.  Years, if I add up all the hours.  Am I not morally required to give something back?  I’ve written, sweated over, edited, and polished my novels.  Yet they sit on my hard drive seen by my eyes only and the even harder eyes of alabaster editors. Such is a writer’s life.  I’m not really looking for th...

So, I've been thinking about how writers write.  A colleague who just published his first novel said that he planned it out in detail.  Each chapter was driven by what would have to happen in the next chapter to reach his final resolution.  The final result was a fun read. Some famous writers, I've been told, write by the seat of their metaphorical pants.  They sit down and begin to write with a vague idea of where the story should go.  They, like many of us, discover their characters have minds of their own.  Hopes, dreams, and plans that conflict with those of the author. I often write in snippets.  Great phrases come to me and I think, "that would make a good story."  I write them down.  A notebook is never more than a few inches from me at all times.  I used to have a waterproof note board in the shower.  Some of the best ideas come when I'm driving. When I can catch these snippets, I write them down.  My digital file...

Like many people, I had a few days off over the recent holiday season.  Being a working-class writer is not easy, since most employers demand their pound of flesh, and then some, so taking a few days to write was, in a word, bliss. The new year begins with a new round of responsibilities and a boss making renewed demands for more time.  As it is, the time I have to write is measured in minutes rather than hours.  I keep hoping that this will be the year that I’m noticed. Well, I may be exaggerating there a bit.  I started writing fiction, by my recollection, in about 1975.  It may have been earlier, given how sloppy those initial manuscript pages look.  In a working-class family, I didn’t have the first idea about how to get published.  I’m still learning. 2014 was a boon to me, with four fiction pieces published in one calendar year.  That has never happened before.  I first started sending out potential publications in 2009, an...