risx
risx asked David Wong:

Sorry if this has been asked before but, how did you craft your writing style? Does it just come naturally or does it take a lot of revision, was there anything that inspired it? I remember stumbling on a cracked article you wrote and falling in love with how you write, which obviously lead me to your books.

David Wong To pick just one aspect, I grew up in the word processor era, so the concept of endless rewriting/editing being super easy was there from the start (where writing with a typewriter is more straight through, then marking changes and doing it straight through again). There are paragraphs in my books that have been rewritten 50 times, there are scenes that have been moved, cut, put back, moved, then moved again. A work-in-progress looks like a somewhat coherent string of text and then a bunch of pasted in lines/conversations/scenes that I've just moved out of the way knowing I want them in later. I write scenes out of order, I jump around and do whatever part I feel like messing with that day. All of that is due to technology that makes the writing process far more fluid and malleable. The dense comedy style you saw in the early 2000s that taught me was also born from that - every sentence is a punchline, because the writer can just keep punching it up over and over until they're satisfied. It just changes how your brain thinks of text.

There were a bunch of other elements at play but that's one that rarely gets discussed so here you go!
David Wong
5,714 followers

About Goodreads Q&A

Ask and answer questions about books!

You can pose questions to the Goodreads community with Reader Q&A, or ask your favorite author a question with Ask the Author.

See Featured Authors Answering Questions

Learn more