K. Marvin Bruce

A criticism that I’ve occasionally received concerns pacing.  The short story, which today means up to about 7000 words, is a limited amount of space to establish mood.  My writing partner Elizabeth was reading a Poe short story recently and commented on how long it seemed. We’ve been accustomed, by the internet, to shorten things.  Flash fiction is in.  Say it in 1000 words or less.  What’s the correct pacing for a 300-word story? I’ve been editing a number of my complete, but unpublished, stories lately.  I’m trying to bring the word counts down.  I don’t want to be thought of as a plodding writer.  At the same time, I’m no action writer.  My stories are thoughtful. Some time ago I started reading Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire .  Dark, moody, and sensuous, this is a slow-paced novel.  Focusing on subtleties and emotions, she paints a writerly picture of the inner life of the undead. If I were an editor to...

One of the tropes rife in the editorial world, regarding non-fiction, is “this should be an article instead of a book.”  This is a very disappointing thing for an author to hear.  After all, s/he spent years developing an idea into something long enough to be called a book, only to have it suggested s/he should cut it down. I write fiction, and I love to do so.  Once I’m in the  world I’ve imagined, it is difficult for me to break away.  In my day-job, however, I have written, and continue to write, creative non-fiction.  I recently managed to get one of these pieces up to 60,000 words so that I could call it a book.  A friend suggested maybe it should be an article instead. This is the dilemma of the writer seeking publication.  You have to meet the expectations of a publisher.  Nobody knows the piece as well as the author, and it hurts to cut organs away—body parts that your mind organically grafted into the body of your work. ...

Autumn is the ideal time for writers.  At least in the opinion of this struggling author.  The mood is just right for inspiration.  Even the mention of Halloween brings delightfully creepy images to mind, and other doleful delicacies. This September, however, finds me in a tangle of non-fiction.  Hoping against hope to divine the correct alchemy to get creative writing published, I’ve been putting efforts toward my non-fiction tome.  It’s not a fall book.  It’s a quotidian book. Like all my work, it is built from scratch.  Watching the word count at the bottom of the page is like trying to watch and hour hand move on a clock with continuous motion.  I feel like I’ve said so much already, but the industry standard “book length” hasn’t yet been reached. Meanwhile, I’m itching, aching even, to write my usual gloomy autumnal fiction. How long is a book supposed to be?  There’s no right answer to that, of course.  A few...

In my unguarded (i.e., optimistic) moments, I sometimes wonder if underselling oneself is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  For example, sending your writing only to small publishers might lead to small returns.  The big guys are scary, however. Sometimes it seems a small press can’t handle big ideas.  Some fiction goes beyond the usual need to tell a story and contains a much deeper message.  After all, all books are farewell letters to the world.  We want to say something important. Although I keep a spreadsheet with my submissions, sometimes stories get lost in the mix.  Once in a while I’ll stumble upon one that I’d forgotten, an orphan of my feverish imagination.  I wonder why I never tried to get it published.  Then I look at my spreadsheet. It is kind of like an idea graveyard.  Big ideas, small ideas.  Lying side by side in unmarked graves since, never having been published, they’ll never be read by anyone other than thei...

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...