Erich w/ an h asked David Wong:

You get asked a lot of the same questions asked over the years, like "who are you?" and "how did you get in my house?" My question is, what question that you haven't been asked would you want someone to ask you in an interview?

David Wong For anyone who makes things, from movie directors to architects, the most interesting parts of the job are things nobody else notices. By design, I mean - your biggest challenges are in making things seamless. Some architect may spent a solid year trying to figure out how to pull off his or her design in a way that hides the ugly HVAC duct work while maintaining the unique shape of the ceiling. They could talk for days and days about all of the clever workarounds they tried before coming up with the solution, but that's not interesting to anyone but other people in the industry.

It's no different here; writing a complicated story with lots of characters means constantly running into problems - the ideal flow of the plot would also require the characters to be in two places at once, or would require a character to act in a way that's not true to who they are (like getting over a tragedy too quickly, because the next scene needs to be played for comedy). The goal is to make it seamless. So I would love to do an hours-long interview about the convoluted process of problem-solving in writing ("I know this scene needs to take place in a body of water, but why would they be in the water at all?") but interviewers never ask those questions for good reason: That's not what readers want. It ruins the fun. Nobody goes to a restaurant to hear the waiter describe how the chicken was plucked.

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