Goodreads asked Mark Leidner:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

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.

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