K. Marvin Bruce

Life is plenty complicated without writing.   Life’s impossible without writing. You see, I’ve got tons of fiction here.   Well, it be tons if I printed it out.   I’ve been writing every day for decades now.   Long past the limit Neal Stephenson once told me, the 100,000 words you throw out before calling yourself a writer.   The problem is, life’s complicated. I happened into a New York City bookstore.   On the same shelf paperbacks by the aforementioned Neal and Robert Repino.   I know them both.   I returned home and fired up the laptop.   Hundreds of stories.   Half a dozen novels.   Amid all of this, just one story of mine that one small journal thought was worthy of actual ink.   It won third place in a contest. There’s no way to count pre-computer writing.   I was born before the advent of the household CPU.   Before electronic calculators.   We thought the TI-30 was a big deal,...

One of the most challenging aspects of being a working writer is dithering.   Shilly-shallying.   Not being able to decide.   Is this story done yet?   Should I revise it for a tenth time?   When do I stop writing fiction and get back to non-fiction?   And all of this has to be decided for a mere half-hour of writing time a day. I’ve neglected this blog a little because I’ve been finishing up a non-fiction book.   To no one’s greater surprise than mine, an editor at Penguin is actually reading it.   You just never know.   Meanwhile novel number seven has been demanding my attention.   One through six haven’t been published yet either. Don’t forget the children.   Stories.   Lots of stories.   Some days three or four story ideas crowd into my head at a time.   And I only have half-an-hour to write.   Decisions, decisions! I’d pretty much decided to turn back to non-fiction for a while when I had an un...

Being a working writer means living with inherent contradictions.  For fifty weeks of the year daily life involves awaking between 3:00 and 3:30 a.m., writing for half an hour, and catching a bus to over eight hours of work in New York City.  Then riding the bus back home again in time for supper and bed.  I’m not complaining, just observing.  That’s what writers do. That lifestyle—constantly tired, anxious, and pressed for time to get the mundane chores done (paying bills, balancing the checkbook, taking out the recycling)—wears me down like a grindstone.  When the weekend comes I sleep an extra half hour or so and, although refreshed, I awake without the urgency that frames five days a week.  It’s a crisis. Every year I save up enough vacation days to take off between Christmas and New Year’s.  As a former professor this is a no-brainer.  In my industry (publishing) there’s no such thing as an emergency.  Nobody dies if a book is r...

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....

Angel Hunter is the darkest story I’ve ever written.  A combination of things—feeling lost in New York City, having stories rejected multiple times, seeing what seemed to be good turn evil—forced me to explore my darkest imagination. The story went through several permutations on its way to birth.  Initially I tried to take the edge off with some humor.  It was a little gross and a little funny.  The more I reworked it and rewrote it, the more sober it became.  I realized I was the angel hunter. Deep Water Literary Journa l accepted it for publication.  Many other journals disliked it for a variety of reasons.  Assuming the fault was my own, I rewrote and rewrote until someone took it seriously. We assume that angels are good.  It is almost one of those “by definition” things.  Just accept it.  I wonder what happens when we question everything.  Sometimes, it seems to me, sad can be happy.  Sometimes rage can feel...

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 belitt...