David Wong
This is going to sound ridiculous considering I write lists for my day job, but I really don't rank anything in my life, it's one of the more unusual parts of my personality, apparently. I couldn't tell you my favorite movie, song, book, restaurant or vacation destination. I definitely couldn't rank a top 5 in any of them, not TV shows or albums or anything. Every experience is so different, how do you quantify them?
I mean obviously I can name BAD experiences, the time I went to a restaurant and the waiter left half way through the meal, like we watched him drive out of the parking lot and nobody else picked up our table, I know that ranks low. But the good ones are all just kind of on a plane together.
So this is no different, like these books vary wildly in degree of difficulty on the author's end, but that doesn't mean they're better or worse experiences, some were just harder. I like the subject matter of all of them equally because I was given 100% freedom to pick, I'm not being assigned books to write, if I'm unhappy with a plot or direction I just change it. In terms of the actual experience of writing, so much of that is dictated by things going on outside of writing. During much of JDATE I was in desperate financial circumstances, during Spiders I was having to juggle a new day job ...
So they're all just kind of lumped in as good experiences, then one day if I have a really bad one I'll have a vague sense that it should rank lower.
I mean obviously I can name BAD experiences, the time I went to a restaurant and the waiter left half way through the meal, like we watched him drive out of the parking lot and nobody else picked up our table, I know that ranks low. But the good ones are all just kind of on a plane together.
So this is no different, like these books vary wildly in degree of difficulty on the author's end, but that doesn't mean they're better or worse experiences, some were just harder. I like the subject matter of all of them equally because I was given 100% freedom to pick, I'm not being assigned books to write, if I'm unhappy with a plot or direction I just change it. In terms of the actual experience of writing, so much of that is dictated by things going on outside of writing. During much of JDATE I was in desperate financial circumstances, during Spiders I was having to juggle a new day job ...
So they're all just kind of lumped in as good experiences, then one day if I have a really bad one I'll have a vague sense that it should rank lower.
More Answered Questions
Alexandra Murphy
asked
David Wong:
First of all, thank you. For your sense of humor, your writing style, your characters, your responses to FAQs, your Cracked articles, your hilarious Animal Crossing tweets, and, most importantly, for continuing to write new books! Secondly, do you have any book recommendations? Horror-comedy or otherwise? I'm always told it's a good idea to read your favorite author's favorite books, so what or who do you recommend?
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