K. Marvin Bruce

  The thing about being a working writer is you don’t have time.   Between working nine-to-five and trying to eat and sleep, and write, of course, the week is shot.   Weekends are spent doing the errands that you can’t do during the week. I should probably have known better than to join a local writers’ group.   Their meetings, although only once a month, are all-day affairs on a Saturday.   I generally don’t have all day Saturday to spare.   I work all week and I need groceries and the occasional Target run.   And I haven’t yet learned to go a week without eating. This is actually the third writers’ group I’ve joined.   One was not too far from home, but not terribly helpful.   They met on Saturdays, but in the morning only.   Nobody seemed interested in what I was writing, so I stopped going. The second one was about an hour away.   They also met on Saturdays.   Their big thing was having lunch together after the meeting. ...

My writing partner Elizabeth has started a writing club in her local community.  I am really thrilled, since having others to share the enthusiasm for the craft is one of the most fulfilling aspects of life that I can imagine.  Talking with fellow writers has been my panacea and placebo for many years. In a pique over my own lack of progress, I followed up on the many places where I’ve submitted material and have heard nothing in return.  Perhaps a dozen literary magazines regularly reply when you submit something.  The rest will just leave you wondering. As I was crawling over websites looking for any evidence that my submissions might still be alive, it occurred to me that I write for myself.  As another friend once said, we write what we can’t find anybody else writing.  I do it knowing that most of it will never be published. There is a difference between writing for personal fulfillment and writing for publication.   My writing is...

Do writing groups really help?  I believe they can.  Indeed, they must.  At work someone has started up a creative writing group.  I went to a meeting.  I felt old. Like dirty old man old.  I mean, shouldn’t somebody my age already know about publishing?  Shouldn’t I put up or shut up?  What was a guy old enough to be the father of everyone in the room to say? I’ve been part of writers’ groups before.  I joined the Liberty State Writers Group once upon a time.  I felt lost.  There were so many of them, and they all knew each other.  I’m shy, like a writer, and soon felt lost.  I stopped going before my dues ran out. I still remember one girl there.  I never knew her name.  She shyly smiled at me and said “hi” a time or two.  I bet she wrote the kinds of thing I do.  I’ll never know. More recently a joined a mostly male writerly group.  Males tend to be more aggressive, self-i...