Blazing Reader,

Last week, master novelist Dean Koontz made his second appearance on David Perell's How I Write podcast, speaking about why the science is never settled:

“You hear this again and again: ‘The science on this is settled. The science on that is settled.’

“The science is never settled. It isn’t possible. That isn’t science. Science overturns everything it thought it knew over the centuries. When you think about what people thought about the human body or the nature of the universe, two hundred years ago… Almost all of it’s been overturned. Stuff we thought we knew forty, fifty years ago, is totally overturned.

“So to think that you can explain any of it is not going to be the case. But I do think if you are just willing to relax about your view of the world and everything in it and say it’s all beyond comprehension, things start coming to you as a writer that are much more valuable.

“And I don’t just mean strange storylines. I mean the way you handle a character. How you get into a character’s depth. You stop thinking about psychology in the same way — because we don’t understand the human mind any more than we do of much of anything else.

“We like to tell ourselves we do because we’re human beings and we’re scared very easily. We’re frightened of reality. So we want to feel we can control it. And I think just throwing your hands up, saying, ‘I don’t really control anything,’ opens the door to a better understanding of people and the world and how it works.”

For the full interview with Dean Koontz, head on over to David Perell's YouTube channel (where you can see Koontz’s massive home library).

John C.A. Manley

P.S. On the subject of psychology, a psychologist reviewed my novel, Much Ado About Corona. Read what she had to say here: "Full of Irony and Subtle Humour": A Short Book Review by Dr. Éva Székely

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona, All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of philosophical fiction that are "so completely engaging that you find yourself alternately laughing, gasping, hanging on for dear life." Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber.