James Lee Burke I invited my friend and fellow writer, Craig Terlson, to have a conversation about James Lee Burke, a fine crime/suspense author with a substantial body of work. Burke has sold a ton of books, but he’s lesser known than giants like Elmore Leonard, Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, or Michael Connelly, but when … Continue reading A Conversation about James Lee Burke
A Writer’s Question: To Plot or Not to Plot?
I recently read Stephen King’s On Writing for the first time. Everyone knows that King is a wildly successful writer, and there’s that perennial question of whether he’s actually a good writer. (Yes, bad writers can be wildly successful, witness Dan Brown, who is a horrific writer.) I’ll confess that I’ve only read one of … Continue reading A Writer’s Question: To Plot or Not to Plot?
Perseverance: A Writer’s Virtue, or: How to Get to ‘Yes’
A little over two years ago, I posted a piece called “I Tweet, Therefore I Am,” in which I bemoaned the current state of publishing, swore of self-publishing forever, and argued that it didn’t make sense for someone to build an online presence before he or she had produced something to promote (e.g., a novel). … Continue reading Perseverance: A Writer’s Virtue, or: How to Get to ‘Yes’
I Tweet, Therefore I Am
Anyone who gets updates on my blog knows that I haven’t posted anything in a while, and I’m here to say that I’m not going to post anything for a while longer (except for this, of course). There are three reasons for this, two practical, and one ideological. The first, more mundane reason is that … Continue reading I Tweet, Therefore I Am
Committed: Writing as Life, Part I: History
I chose “writing as life” as the title for this series because if you’re truly a writer, the work becomes your life. It’s clichéd but true: You write because you have to. It’s a compulsion, a need deep down inside. If you do it—that is, put words together, tell stories, work with language, try to … Continue reading Committed: Writing as Life, Part I: History
WHY I WRITE
"Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit." --Nietzsche. This is my entry for a blog hop (sounds like a drunk frog) called “Why I Write.” It was Drew Chial who tagged me in his excellent entry, so you can blame him. Origins I do two kinds of writing: academic (philosophical essays, … Continue reading WHY I WRITE
Narratives and Our Ways of Knowing Part I: Plato’s Dialogues
Narratives and Our Ways of Knowing Part I: Plato’s Dialogues The question of knowledge is a very old problem, going back to the ancients. What we can know about the world, and how we know it, is a huge puzzle. Now, we all love to tell stories, to tell people about things that have happened … Continue reading Narratives and Our Ways of Knowing Part I: Plato’s Dialogues
Nietzsche and the Importance of Translation
Nietzsche has been on my mind lately, and more about that in subsequent posts. Right now I want to talk about this quote that I pulled from GoodReads. It’s a translation of an epigram from Beyond Good and Evil (#147): “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the … Continue reading Nietzsche and the Importance of Translation
Mark T. Conard 