The Experience of Being Invisible

Writing a whole novel is difficult. I've finished five and am nearly done with six. Seven is almost half-way there. A friend who is a successful writer says, "Write 100,000 words, and throw them away. Then you're a writer."

Personally, I passed that benchmark long ago, maybe even before the invention of computers to mock me with the fact. But you kind of get used to being out of sight. Consider the invisible man.

In the nineteenth century, it seems, publishers were starved for material. They would publish anything relatively good, just by dint of it being finished. Today publishers are obese and lazy. Prone to overlook really excellent writing, because it doesn't bring in enough free lunches.

Writing novels, in my experience, means spending hundreds and hundreds of hours going over and re-going over story lines for inconsistency, begging muses to sleep with you, and awaking even more frustrated than you fell asleep. Those who belittle the craft have never tried it.

Jack London famously said that you had to pursue inspiration with a cudgel. I wonder if Jack London worked a job that kept him in the office from six a.m. to seven p.m. Monday through Friday? I carry my cudgel with me, just in case.

I have a friend who works in New York City. He tells me that it is a city full of invisible men and women. Maybe 8 million people can ignore one another. What about the 24 million of Shanghai?

A while back I queried an agent about my last finished novel. I had an auto-response and have heard not a peep since. You can’t seem to get anywhere in the writing world without an agent. Even to agents, however, you can be invisible.

I can’t count the number of hours I’ve spent writing. Apart from that which is necessary for work, I suspect the greatest part of my waking hours have been spent behind either the paper or the keyboard. And someday I hope that the first door will crack open, that first novel appear.

First novels are like the breach in a dike. Once the water gets through, there’s no putting it back. Let it wash away the 100,000 words. If nothing else, a catastrophic flood is incapable of being ignored.

Comments

Dusty

My, this thing is dusty. My fans—hi, Mom!—perhaps believe me to have perished in the pandemic. No, it was nonfiction’s fault. Since the pandemic began I’ve had two nonfiction books published and have written a third. With a nine-to-five job something’s got to give. Unfortunately it’s been fiction. Well, the groundhog didn’t see his shadow yesterday, so it must be safe to come out. I shuffled away the rejection notes and began submitting again. I’ve got a backlog of weird stories and maybe some new publishers have emerged? The thing is, don’t you just hate it when you’re in the mood to submit and some lit journal has its window for submissions firmly shut? My last story, “ The Hput, ” was published about three years ago. Oh, I’ve submitted since then, but with no traction. Well, it is winter. I’ve got a lot of stories lined up. I’ve been sending them out again, dreaming of making a dime at what I love doing best. When you’ve been writing for half a century, you l

Neglectful Parents

If I was a parent I’d be accused of neglect. I have to say 2017 was the least published year of recent memory. Not that I’ve been neglecting my fiction, but I had a non-fiction book accepted and I work full-time and commute to that job—you get the picture. I’ve also had a personal epiphany. If you can write, you should get paid for it. I know a publicist (not my own; I don’t have one) and she says she won’t let her authors even write an op-ed if they don’t get paid. I guess I’d never get published then. My Medusa novel had a flicker of hope for a few moments. A publisher actually wrote back asking for the rest of the manuscript. That’s never happened before. Then the editor disappeared. Even called me by the wrong pseudonym. I’ve gotta wonder about that because the second half of the novel’s even better than the first. While looking for an agent for my non-fiction (couldn’t find one of those either) I came across several who said they liked quirky ficti

Too Much Writing?

Has this ever happened to you? Have you written a story that you’ve completely forgot? Not only completely forgotten, but made unfindable? I play games with my stories and sometimes the joke’s on me. Okay, I suffer from graphomania. I write constantly. I do try to keep organized—I use a spreadsheet that has all my submissions on it. It has rejection/acceptance dates (mostly rejection). Lots of information. I decided to list on it every story, whether finished or in process. There are far too many (mostly in process). When I finish a story I often submit it. If I get burned, I’m shy about resubmitting. I often rewrite at this stage. Then, when I feel brave enough, I try again. The spreadsheet is color-coded. There, in the color that indicates finished and ready to submit is a story cryptically titled “The Password.” I don’t remember this story. I can’t recall what it was about or why I thought it was ready to publish. Looking through my electronic files,

K. Marvin Bruce

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