K. Marvin Bruce

The search for an agent is entering its fourth month and I often wonder just what classics we’d have to live without if Herman Melville or Charlotte Bronte had received email after email saying “it just doesn’t have that ‘have to have’ feeling.”   We’d be literary beggars. The true irony of this is I know people who work in the publishing industry.   They say that someone with my background should be a no-brainer for an agent.   When I was a young man a friend accused me of writing too much like Melville.   “Nobody writes like that anymore,” he said.   His father-in-law was a writer. Melville was friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne.   Their works are endlessly remade in a more modern idiom.   Electrum may look like gold, but it’s not the same.   Why not search for the real thing? People learn how to do things from watching the masters.   While it may have been the glib Doc Savage and Dark Shadows pulps that led me to reading, I soon...

A few years ago my writing partner Elizabeth pointed me to the website “I Write Like” ( iwl.me ).  As I mentioned in my last post, I don’t emulate anyone in particular, but, like most writers I pick up some traits of those I read. Back when I first tried I Write Like, it was hardly surprising that its first answer was H. P. Lovecraft.  I’d been reading a lot of Lovecraft at the time, and I sent in a sizable sample of my writing.  Oh, and it also suggested Stephen King. Elizabeth tried it and also came up with Stephen King, despite the fact that her writing was, at the time, young adult and geared towards talking cats.  Perhaps Mr. King has written so much that it is hard not to sound like him? I’ve written thousands and thousands of words since I last visited the website.  Not really sure I’d still find it available, I was pleased to see it there.  I’ve been experiencing a reading malaise, and I needed to recharge my dry cells. Copying seve...