K. Marvin Bruce

Writing is kind of like sex.  It feels wonderful, but it is really difficult to manage with someone watching you.  I live in a small place, with a partner.  I have to get up very early to write, before my significant other is awake. Even if someone is not paying attention, but is in the same room, I can’t perform.  Writing is a solitary activity.  Tricky for those of us who can’t afford a house, or at least a large apartment. My writing partner Fantasia asked me recently if I have a special place.  Ever since reading Little Women many years ago, I’ve often thought about the habits of writers.  I’ve never had enough money to afford a domicile with a special place.  I don’t have a study or den.  I have a chair that I favor in the living room. This chair affords me a view of all other rooms without doors in my apartment.  I can see if anyone else can see me.  If a door is open.  If I am not alone.  I really want...

One of my friends is an established author.  He has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list multiple times although he isn’t really a household name.  He writes big books.  Some topping a thousand pages.  He won’t compromise. On my nightstand at the moment is a first novel of some four hundred pages.  Prior to it, several of my last bedtime projects involved first books of similar or greater size.  Big books.  Something into which you could sink your teeth. Pardon the cliche. Recently some literate friends were saying how much they love descriptive writing.  Thing is, description takes word counts.  Like most writers struggling to find publishers, one of the first obstacles I face is reflected in the adage “write short to write long.” Implied witticism aside, this can be a problem.  I’m the first to admit that stories of my own that I’ve pruned down often appear better for the effort.  To bring some more comple...

“Infatuation, Technically,” was technically published on the Danse Macabre blog this past week.  This brief tale evolved out of experience working in a office where women are as difficult to get to know as they are arresting.  But the story isn’t really about that. If it weren’t for technology I wouldn’t be a published author (if what I can be called is such).  I make my submissions online and I receive my electronic voice online.  I look at maps online and I haven’t touched a phonebook in years. But still.  I’m still not convinced all of this technology is a good thing.  “Infatuation, Technically” is about the love of technology.  The human element is gone.  I could be dating a clone and wouldn’t even know it.  This food I’m eating never occurred in nature.  That fly buzzing around my head is a drone. A friend told me they are now printing cells with 3-D printers.  What if we haven’t found all the dimensions yet? ...

I write for mood.  This was an epiphany I had this week.  I started writing long before I started reading about writing.  What I wrote reflected who I’d been reading—mostly Edgar Allan Poe and Ray Bradbury. Contemporary writing gurus indicated that we should cut to the chase.  The modern attention span isn’t comfortable with the building of mood.  They keep a finger on the mouse at all times, my friend, ready to click off your page if a yawn even starts. And this sickness has infected editors.  We want the quick fix.  Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.  Literary foreplay is so twentieth century.  And the millennia before that.  The earliest recorded stories, like the Gilgamesh Epic, are repetitive and build to the action slowly.  We don’t have time for that any more. Many hours of my childhood were whiled away behind a Ray Bradbury collection of stories.  Some were little more than prose tone poems, but they were beautif...

A rare day off work.  What to do?   I have been writing fiction since I was in middle school.  There was a hiatus of maybe a decade and a half during which I was learning “higher education” ways of expressing myself.  But the call to fiction was too strong to ignore. One of the most influential people in my life was a teacher whom I never had in class.  He was the faculty advisor to the creative writing club.  In high school he urged me to try to publish my work, but publication was too scary a step, and I didn’t know how.  Fact is, I still don’t.  Only now I’m old enough that that doesn’t stop me. Mr. Milliken said that the key to writing was constancy.  Write at least fifteen minutes a day.  In some form or other, I’ve been doing that for decades.  I realized on my day off that I had dozens of stories half-finished, some of which I couldn’t remember writing.  I also had dozens finished that I have never tried to ...

As the author of six novels (none published) Banned Book Week, which begins tomorrow, always has a special appeal.  People have been writing for over four thousand years, and it might seem that there’s little left to say that won’t offend someone.  So I celebrated Banned Book Week with abandon. There’s no official “western canon” of banned books.  Suffice it to say that if you have a favorite, it’s probably on somebody’s list.  Although we gladly watch televisions shows frothing over with sex and violence, if you try to put it in a book, someone will object.  Loudly. Many cultural heroes, of the literary sort, have spent a stint or two on the banned book lists.  We feel that our children shouldn’t read such things.  They might act out the violence or adult situations and who’s going to clean up after all that?  It is easier to prevent them reading. I recall RIF.  Reading Is Fundamental.  It was a program in full swing when I...

I admire the courage of anyone who publishes fiction.  As a sometime writer of the same, I know that, should anyone read my paltry offerings, I open myself to criticism and critique.  It’s a bit of me on each page I scribble. Still, often I read material that makes me cringe.  Tips from writers who succeeded tell us what to avoid, yet some fiction writers still seem unaware.  Novels full of cliches, telling—not showing, and telling yet again, over-written and lacking subtlety make their way into my hands.  I want to bury my eyes in a box of salt. But there are virtues in such reading.  Perhaps the greatest is that poor writing reminds me that I don’t know how my work appears to others.  I recently read a novel that tried me sorely.  I realized as I read, however, that I was learning on each page. Many of us learn to write by reading good writers.  If we read enough, we take on the successful habits of our idols.  Their caden...