Jeff Kinney Talks About His Creative Process
“What I do is I spend about six months just writing jokes, and they’re disassociated with everything—they’re not even connected to one another. So what I do is come up with a pile of jokes. I find that 350 is my ideal number. And then what I do is I look at the jokes and see if there’s a theme, and then I start working on the theme, and then I try to string the jokes together into a plot. So I really put a priority on humor in the books and not on plot, because I’m really trying to get maybe two laughs a page. If I wrote it the other way around, where I wrote a narrative or started with a theme, then I’d be trying to inject humor into it, and I don’t think the books would be as good.” (mental floss)
