Ask the Author: Mark Leidner
Answered Questions (12)
Mark Leidner
I’m doing ok Alder. I haven’t been on Goodreads in a while. It’s strange to be back here, but not unpleasant. Thank you for the question.
Mark Leidner
Writing functions both an escape from the most depressing aspects of life and also a way to confront them in an indirect or amusing way, so it's easy to keep going as a writer. Life would be much more stifling/punishing without the escape hatch writing provides, and life feel more meaningless without the methods of finding meaning that it provides. Though I guess if I stopped writing, I might soon find another way to escape/confront the limitations of living, but I wouldn't be nearly as good at it, whatever it was, so the escape would be less complete and the meaning found might not be as sustaining. Who knows.
As for getting up in the morning, getting up is much easier for me than going to bed. There are too many things I want to do so I often end up waking up too early and feeling very tired yet unable to go back to sleep. At night there are too many things I want to do too, so I end up putting off sleep until way past when I should have.
As for getting up in the morning, getting up is much easier for me than going to bed. There are too many things I want to do so I often end up waking up too early and feeling very tired yet unable to go back to sleep. At night there are too many things I want to do too, so I end up putting off sleep until way past when I should have.
Mark Leidner
I feel like the mysteries in my life — what is death, what is life, how to be a good person, how to let go of what must be let go of, how to hold on to what must be held on to, etc — would not be good plots for a book. They probably make good themes for any book, but "plot" implies something more narratively compact and explosive than how these mysteries tend to deepen and unfold in life.
Mark Leidner
Almost every emotion inspires me, but the earliest inspirations I had were anger. I'd see another piece of writing that was famous or a writer who seemed to abuse their position of influence and I'd get so angry that I'd want to write something that would contrast with whatever worldview was setting me off. Nowadays that doesn't inspire me, as I've tried to rid myself of anger. Usually what inspires me now is a character I love. I want to live in their shoes or see what they do when they're up against impossible odds, so I write to give them challenges and to see how those challenges change (or don't change) them. I am also motivated by my close friends' and loved ones' encouragement. I want to write in order to live up to their expectations, which, to a large extent, I have set by telling them about what I want to write and why. So there's some element of closeknit community that I feel believes in me and whom I don't want to let down. There are hundreds more things that inspire me, but one is other books I read that are simply beautiful or stunning in their form or content. Those books inspire me. Lately I have drawn the most inspiration from the byzantine and brutal noir mysteries of Philip Kerr, R.I.P. Those novels confront evil in all kinds of ways, and they do so with a kind of hard-won optimism that I am always uplifted by when the evils of the world get me down. I could go on forever but I'll end here.
Mark Leidner
I think I already answered this question, but it doesn't really come up for me. I really enjoy writing, so I often have the opposite problem. Life block. I can't live my life because I'd rather be writing. I deal with that by not writing, but for me that's very hard.
Mark Leidner
An evil demon hunts down otherwise courageous people and traps them in a trance in which they continually relive all the times they were cowardly or made errors of judgment. A person who is actually cowardly, moved by the plight of these courageous people, and in order to redeem what they perceive as their own towering cowardice, tries to stop the demon.
Mark Leidner
I'd travel into Rachel Cusk's "Outline" and try to do silly or nonsensical things that would require the narrator to comment on, describe, or speculate on the meaning of them.
Mark Leidner
Summer's pretty much over, but here's what I read this summer:
Philip Kerr, "A Quiet Flame"
Rachel Cusk, "Outline"
Scott Lynch, "The Republic of Thieves"
Ken Baumann, "The Country"
Madeline ffitch, "Stay and Fight"
Emily Pettit, "Blue Flame"
Chris DeWeese, "The Confessions"
Michael Collins, "Carrying the Fire"
Peter Hamilton, "Mindstar Rising"
Alexander Dumas, "The Three Musketeers"
Philip Kerr, "A Quiet Flame"
Rachel Cusk, "Outline"
Scott Lynch, "The Republic of Thieves"
Ken Baumann, "The Country"
Madeline ffitch, "Stay and Fight"
Emily Pettit, "Blue Flame"
Chris DeWeese, "The Confessions"
Michael Collins, "Carrying the Fire"
Peter Hamilton, "Mindstar Rising"
Alexander Dumas, "The Three Musketeers"
Mark Leidner
"Under the Sea," forthcoming 6/26/18, is a book of short stories, so each story was conceived differently. I got the idea for the first story "Bad-Asses" when at Thanksgiving last year, my father-in-law was telling everyone about growing up in a town where there were "two bad-asses" and they would always be fighting each other. I got the idea for the second story "21 Extremely Bad Breakups" when I was lost and confused and couldn't seem to write any good stories, so I decided to try to write "the worst story possible," i.e., throwing any consideration of coherent plot or character out the window and just having fun with a bunch of absurd breakup scenarios. I got the idea for the third story "Avern-Y6" when I tried to write a novel from an insect's point of view, like "A Bug's Life," but didn't know what I was doing in terms of novel-structure, so I took the best part and made it into a self-contained story. Anyway, there are like 5 more stories, and it would be tedious to describe how they were all inspired, but it's all stuff like that.
Mark Leidner
This changes too frequently to put a specific answer here. If you're curious, feel free to ask directly, and I'll tell you what it is at that moment.
Mark Leidner
Live your life to embetter the lives of others, especially those who are different from you, and who have less than you. If you do that and can some how still work in writing, you will have a conscience necessary to write something worth reading. I definitely have not done this, and I wish I had. Second, you have to educate yourself in the ways of craft, depending on what it is your goal to write. No one can teach you what you need to know except yourself. So learn how to self-teach, and you'll learn everything you need to know to write what you want. That doesn't mean don't study writing in school, though. You can learn a lot from teachers, but the lessons of teachers are worthless if you don't also have the ability to learn from yourself, especially from your mistakes or botched attempts at writing various things. Teachers are like icing, but if the cake of self-learning is not there, the icing alone will not fill you up and will probably give you a stomach ache. Three, I think it takes about 10 years to learn how to write like you want. Just my opinion, but others have said similar things. That's about 10 years of practicing every day and learning from 10 years worth of writerly experiments. Which seems like a long time, but it's actually a short time, since at the end of it, your perspective on time will have changed. Four, to even try to write, whether or not you succeed, is worth it. If you can figure out how to be made happy by the trying, the aspiration, the endeavour--rather than the outcome or destination--then you will be better able to sustain the inevitable psychological miseries and screeching self-doubts that are the price of the infinite imaginative freedom that writing gives you.
Mark Leidner
I guess the best thing is the illusion of your imaginative life mattering that it gives you. But like all illusions it eventually shatters and you're left with the wreckage of a belief system instead of beliefs. But in that way it's no different than any other profession, occupation, art, or task. You might as well ask "What's the best thing about being?" The best thing about being is the pleasure the illusion of being gives, which is also the worst thing about being, since the withdrawal symptoms once the illusion of being is gone are quite harsh. But if you survive those symptoms, the pleasure of accepting your own insignificance is fairly expansive.
About Goodreads Q&A
Ask and answer questions about books!
You can pose questions to the Goodreads community with Reader Q&A, or ask your favorite author a question with Ask the Author.
See Featured Authors Answering Questions
Learn more