Patrick asked David Wong:

If you had to write a fantasy novel (like, at gunpoint I guess? For months straight?), what would it be about? What tropes appeal to or aggravate you?

David Wong Well, since I wouldn't want to spend the next five years world-building and drawing a fictional map and developing detailed histories and languages of the twelve races who vie for power in the region, I guess I'd keep it a small story. Like it'd focus on one nobody and you'd just get hints of the greater world as they encounter it. Like maybe there's a farmer and he gets some kind of strange illness (enough to hint to the reader that this isn't our world) and his wife has to venture off their farm to go get some potion or whatever from the healer, who lives far away, and she encounters all sorts of strange people and monsters that hint that the land is in the middle of some large scale conflict, but she's not really interested in that, she's not the one foretold in the prophecy, she's just a brave woman who needs medicine. Then it turns out the healer is a charlatan and she's forced to endure a lot of trials and shit in order to get the real cure, and all along the way people keep trying to trick her or take advantage, and she has to outwit them.

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