Goodreads asked Mark Leidner:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

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.

flag