How Do You Come Up With Wayne’s Little Wisecracks?

So here’s the deal. It’s kinda hard to write people who are more clever than you are. It’s one of the tricks you have to learn as a writer. The big difference is that they do it off the cuff in the moment, and you can spend a week or two trying to find the perfect thing to say. That’s really how it goes. Oftentimes what he says seems very natural, but it can take me weeks to come up with like a couple of lines of dialogue for Wayne, where other things get written very quickly. My favorite Wayneisms are when I can have him use a word that looks-when you’re reading along-like the right word, but then you go back and you’re like, “Wait a minute. Did he actually say defecation of character?” Or something like that. So you don’t even notice on the first read through. The things that a copy editor’s like, “You used the wrong word here,” those are my favorite Wayneisms. Those take forever.