K. Marvin Bruce

Do you admit that you’re a writer?  If it’s in your job description I suppose you do, but for many of us being a writer presents us with a dilemma.  Do you admit to your boss that you’re hoping to get paid for what you do off the clock? I have a friend in the publishing industry whose employer has strict rules about such things.  Any “employment” that takes away from work time has to be declared in written form and sent to the office that investigates conflict of interest.  If you’re a writer who’s paid to do something else you can already see where I’m going with this. Inspiration doesn’t obey time-clocks.  In fact, it almost always makes a mockery of them.  When you’ve arrived at work and punched in (i.e., booted up your PC) does that story idea obediently bed down until 5 p.m.?  Of course not.  Even after you’ve dug into today’s business, it’s probably playing like muzak in the back corridors of your gray matter.  It sometim...

Creativity, as we who write know, begets creativity.  I was reminded of this by having lunch with another writer in New York City.  I use “writer” intentionally since major publishers have studiously avoided both of us, but we carry on, nonetheless. New York has no dearth of writers’ groups and workshops and seminars.  They work best for those who live in the city (unlike yours truly) and who have some spare cash (also unlike yours truly).  Still, meeting with other creatives is what makes our work work. Like the vast majority of writers, I work for a living.  My job, with the added commute, takes up about 90 percent of every waking hour of the work week.  My time for writing adds up to less than five hours per Monday-through-Friday, a pretty sad statistic.  Meeting with other writers has even less than that. Using a nom de plume , I suppose, doesn’t help.  Some of my writer colleagues know who K. Marvin Bruce is, but most do not....

If you’re like most working writers, finding time to practice the craft is a major issue.  Between working and commuting and eating breakfast before and supper after work, about 19 hours of the day are taken up.  Not much time left for writing (or sleeping). Many years ago I realized that if I was going to get any writing done I’d have to get up pretty damned early.  Most days that’s just before 3:30 a.m.  I try to write while eating breakfast.  Ideas come like a furious January snowstorm, but most remain scribbles in my notebook.  When does a writer have time to write? When I was young I had plenty of ideas for stories.  I read constantly, and when I wasn’t reading or watching television, I was writing.  It wasn’t until college, though, that it became an obsession.  After my master’s degree, working in a retail chain, I spent my time off work writing a novel. After I got married and time after work was occupied with other things...

I have friends who are writers.  Almost all of them have other jobs, and most of them aren’t published.  Writing, however, is what drives them.  You can tell that about a writer. Our society has condemned itself over and over again, and one of the ways in which it continues to do so is by blocking writers from publication.  Even many of those “successful” in the art will say it was a matter of luck.  They found the right person at the right time in a threadbare saga that nobody would publish these days. Meanwhile, our society makes it increasingly difficult to get published and the real writers muddle through careers that are, in reality, just jobs. I’m not talking about weekend warriors here—people who write on the spur of the moment and try to get attention for it.  Writing is living for writers.  People who have the immediate response of “I should write about that” to even the most mundane thing that can be made extraordinary with words...

The mind of a writer is a restless place.  Trying my hardest, it’s difficult to shut it down.  I imagine other writers are the same.  Good writing, as I’ve heard, is clear thinking. On the other hand I have a Protestant work ethic that would make even Calvin blush.  If I’m given a task to do, I work assiduously until it is done.  Bosses often mistake this for efficiency. The problem is I’ve generally been employed below my ability level.  That’s not to say that there aren’t busy times at work—there are.  Some times I can’t finish what I need to, no matter how hard I work.  Other times, however, there’s nothing to do. Here’s my dilemma—should I write when there’s no work to do?  Well, that isn’t really a question.  Life is lamentably short; we have a few years and then we’re gone.  Too many of those years are claimed by work.  Much of it is busy-work. In my current employment I’ve been going weeks without ...