Life, Work, Balance

Sometimes work gets in the way of life. Although I manage to write for a few minutes every day, sometimes I’m so distracted that the words are sluggish, like heavily polluted water. At such times, I rely on other authors to help me through.

I recently read Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train. I wasn’t sure what to expect because I try not to read reviews before I start a book. To be honest, I don’t often read bestsellers. Still, as I’ve come to realize, if I want people to read what I write, I have to write like what people read.

It’s no accident, I suppose, that my favorite writers are often people who’ve struggled while they were alive. Struggled either making it in general, or struggled to be recognized in their writing. Ignored by the mainstream, they became classics after they died.

The Girl on the Train is a fast read, and the story is well told. Rachel makes a great unreliable narrator. Still, I had the sense, as I did with Andy Weir’s The Martian, that this wasn’t bound to be a classic. They’re good stories, but they’re contemporary. I’m looking for depth, I guess, that I’m just not seeing.

My early writing hopes were derailed by a well-meaning friend. He had married the daughter of a published English professor. Even gave me a copy of his book. I showed him one of my early novel attempts. “Nobody writes like that,” he said. “You’ll never get it published.”

I’d been reading Melville at the time, and I was going for his heavily significant prose. My friends words bred doubt. I tried to dismiss them, but they ate away at my enthusiasm. The unkindest cut of all.

It didn’t help, I suppose, when I wrote my first novel. Functionally unemployed, newly married, and nostalgic, I wrote a highly symbolic account of life in far-away Boston. I never tried to publish it, which was good. It was my throw-away novel. As was my second.

Somewhere in all this mess there must be a balance. I write because I love to. It is nicer to write if someone wants to read. Fiction ideas come like a dam-burst in the fall, and all I lack is the time to catch them. Instead, I catch a train.

That’s a metaphor, by the way.

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K. Marvin Bruce

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