Writing Scary Part 3

How Bad Could It Possibly Get?

(This is the third installment of our series on bringing suspense into your writing. The series starts here.)

Novel-readers and movie audiences are not passive recipients in the storytelling process; as the movie or novel unfolds before them, they are constantly at work, piecing together clues, reading characters, weighing the relative importance of the various facts and events presented, and anticipating what is likely to happen next. Their minds are continually working, always trying to get one step ahead of the novelist or filmmaker.

And thank God for that, because this is how we frighten them.

Because no matter how terrible or horrific the events we might lay on the reader, no matter how bad we can make things for the protagonist, no matter how worst-case our over-the-top worst-case scenario could possibly be, we can always count on one thing:

The reader's imagination will come up with something even more awful.

Bless them. If we play our cards right, the audience will go out of its way to scare itself.

This is, of course, the essence of suspense. Set the story in motion, keep feeding them cues to get their minds running crazy, and watch them trip all over themselves in terror.

In the posts that follow, we'll focus on the following ideas and techniques:

• Shock, awe, and disturb: Creating a foretaste of the horror to come.
• Hobble the hero.
• Precursors to fear.
• Hitchcock and the guilty conscience.
• Who lives? Who dies? 
• Oops! I forgot to mention the axe-murderer in the closet! Silly me!
• Sensory overload and the agitated camera.
• Narrative pacing and the rush of adrenaline.

Writing Scary Part 2

Horror versus Suspense

(This is the second installment of our series on bringing suspense into your writing. The series starts here.)

I write suspense, not horror, and the difference between the two genres is as much qualitative as it is a question of degree. The goals are different, and the styles are very different.

Horror is an immersive genre. The author bathes the reader in sights, sounds, smells, and sensations to achieve a subconscious, often disorienting, effect. It's akin to being on a raft in whitewater rapids, being carried along by the torrents. There's a certain flow to horror, and the reader willingly lets themselves go with the currents, relinquishing control and allowing the author to take them into dark sidestreams, into terrifying whirlpools, and over the edge of the falls.

Suspense uses many of the same techniques as horror, but the goal is different. The suspense writer seeks to create tension in the story (and may even threaten to take the reader into the rapids) but seeks to use fear as a means of propelling the story towards goals other than fear itself. Both horror and suspense exploit the adrenaline rush, but horror is more about the adrenaline rush than is suspense. As such, horror may at times take on more of a nonlinear, impressionistic feel, while suspense is more likely to remain anchored to the ground in terms of drivers, plot, and character motivations.

From a stylistic perspective, this means that horror is more likely to make heavier use of atmospherics, visuals, sensations, and apparent chaos to achieve its goals. Suspense is more likely to place more reliance on impending plot collisions and emerging character conflicts.

I write suspense rather than horror because it fits my own psychological make-up and writing style. I prefer a somewhat spare, minimalistic approach to description, and horror generally requires a more fulsome descriptive treatment. In my writing, I tend to be as interested in the intellectual life of the characters as I am in their emotional states. So I like to keep my characters tense and moving forward, but I also want them to keep thinking and responding. I don't like to overwhelm them to the degree that horror sometimes can.

So as we explore some of the ways in which novelists can induce fear, it's worth remembering that my bias as a suspense writer will lead me to emphasize techniques that may differ somewhat from the tools favored by the horror writer. I'll do my best to give solid treatment to all approaches, but I feel that I owe you fair disclosure as I discuss them.

Up next: Help the readers scare themselves.

Writing Scary Part 1

Okay, boys and girls...the funtime is over. Dwayne Perkins has left the building, and your new substitute teachers are Alfred Hitchcock, Jonathan Demme, and William Friedkin. We're trading in the belly-laughs for the terrified, maniacal kind.

(This might have been a good day to skip class. Too late. You're already here, and no hall passes are being issued.)

I'm no Stephen King or Dean Koontz, and I'd hardly put my own work in the category of horror. But certain principles of suspense can be learned from the masters and used in different doses for different effects. The underlying principles are essentially the same regardless of whether you are going for the all-out scream or basic nervous tension to keep the pages turning.

We'll get into certain tricks and techniques in future posts, but for this one I am going to hammer the most important central point, and I'm going to hammer it into a whimpering, bloody pulp:

Character Empathy is the Most Important Element of Suspense.

Even if we take the most extreme examples of fear-inducing cinema, the ones whose visual imagery left us with nightmares--the shower sequence in Psycho, the green pea soup in The Exorcist, the face-eating attack in The Silence of the Lambs--we find that the filmmakers in each of these examples spent a tremendous amount of screen-time building characters, establishing back-stories, and creating inter-character relationships prior to the horrifying fireworks.

Indeed, if we watch each of these films with the aid of a stopwatch, we might be shocked to discover how little screen-time is actually devoted to graphic images.

Let's start with the classic that every director can agree on: Psycho.

Hitchcock threw a real curve-ball with this film: He killed his leading lady.

That was unheard-of in movies. Janet Leigh was the star of the movie. She was the name on the marquee. And Hitchcock killed off her character (Marion Crane) about one-third into the story.

As much as the suddenness and blitz-attack quality of the shower scene, this shocked audiences. And it shocked them even more because Hitchcock went to amazing lengths to develop that character. There was a complete plot in the first third of that movie, a moral crisis, a denouement, a resolution. By the time she took that ill-fated shower, we had shared her dreams of escape to a better life, worried over her decision to steal the money, sweated in the car with her when the cop was on her case, and breathed a huge sigh of relief when she finally made the decision to return to Phoenix and make things right.

In other words, we cared about Marion Crane's character. We may not have approved of all the decisions she had made, but we did understand her conflict and were able to put ourselves in her shoes.

Then Hitchcock killed her off. Just like that.

Of course, he didn't waste all that character-work. He brought in her sister as a stand-in for her character for the rest of the movie, and we transferred much of that emotional investment onto the new female lead, which allowed Hitchcock to keep working on us through the rest of the movie. Hitchcock also wasted no time in establishing the tension between the sister and the victim's boyfriend.

But whether we're talking about the Marion Crane story arc, or the Clarisse-Starling-amibitious-West-Virginia-orphan-backstory, or the Damien-Karras-crisis-of-faith-how-could-you-fail-your-ailing-mother-backstory, in every one of these films, the directors went out of their ways to make us care about the characters. Part of this is basic storytelling, of course: We're supposed to care about the characters. But part of this is simply basic suspense creation:

Although suspense can be heightened with atmospherics, tricks and devices, real fear depends on the reader's emotional investment in the characters.

Next stop: Horror versus Suspense

Writing Funny Part 6

Developing Your Comedic Skills

(This is a final post in a six-part series on being funny in novels. To start at the beginning go here.)

Stand-up comedians are not born funny. As talented and skilled at making people laugh as he is today, Dwayne Perkins would not have been a stand-out from the other babies in the delivery room when he entered the world in terms of his ability to make the nurses laugh.

Being funny is the product of both a mindset and a set of skills learned through experimentation and practice. Life experience also has a lot to do with it.

Some of it can't be learned; comedians are partly correct when they say "you either have it or you don't." And if you don't have the underlying "stuff" from which comedic sense is developed, then there's nothing to build on.

The good news, however, is that most people actually do have the initial building blocks in place.

Most people, for example, do have a sense of humor, which is an obvious prerequisite. How do we know this? We know this because people pay good money to watch Dwayne's shows. People line up at the movie theaters to watch Chris Rock, Will Ferrell, and Tina Fey. People tune in to The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men.

Comedians depend on the fact that the people in the audience have a sense of humor. Otherwise, comedy would be a pretty pointless exercise, wouldn't it?

Okay, so that's a start. What else do comedians have?

They have the highly developed ability to observe. You might be surprised to learn that the so-called "class clown" in you high school is actually not the guy most likely to grow up and become a professional comedian. Who's the more likely candidate? That guy standing quietly in the corner at the party, making astute mental observations of the other people, noticing their mannerisms, their conceits, their quirks, and their foibles.

Does that guy sound familiar to you? He should; he's also the same guy who is more likely to become a novelist, because many of the essential skills comedians must possess are the same skills that novelists need to have. After all, comedians are writers and performers, and the quality of their writing is every bit as important to what they do as their ability to perform what they write.

They have an ability to creatively combine ideas together to form new concepts. Comedians are always taking things which appear at first glance to be unrelated and connecting them together in an unexpected way. Novelists who hope to write interesting books must be able to do the same thing.

Good comedians are obsessive about wordcraft. When a comedian develops new material, there is a rigorous editing-revision process at work. The first pass at the material may be funny, but a good comedian is never satisfied with that first pass. He or she will continually tinker with it, finding ways to shorten the set-up, cram in new opportunities to laugh, experiment with the timing, replace weak words with stronger words, cut out any fat that can be trimmed. The first draft will be somewhat loose; the final version will be tight and precise. Good comedians are rigorous editors. So are good novelists.

Still sound familiar? Good. If you're a good novelist, you may have the makings of a good novelist who uses humor effectively.

Obviously, those things alone aren't going to get you booked on The Tonight Show. And that's because there is a process that comedians go through on the road to becoming funny.

When Dwayne first started doing comedy several years ago, I'm going to hazard the following guesses: (1) He already possessed the basic tools needed by any comedian, (2) He had a few ideas he wanted to try out with audiences, and (3) He experienced some hit-or-miss results at first.

As time went on, he got better. He weeded out the stuff that didn't seem to work, expanded on the stuff that did seem to work, and found other ways to get the audience response he was looking for. He also began to see patterns and techniques--nuts and bolts--that tend to help make things funnier and heighten the result with the audience.

And there are some nuts and bolts. These by themselves are not enough to make anyone a comedian, but they are essential tools that nearly all comedians use in one form or another.

To outline some of the nuts and bolts would take an entire book, not just a few blog posts. Fortunately, someone has written such a book already, so I will direct your attention to Comedy Writing Secrets by Melvin Helitzer, a book I cannot recommend highly enough.

Fair warning: This book will not make you funny. No book can ever do that. But if you already have the basic building blocks, it will help you get a leg up on what's going on under the hood.

(Side note: Although this book will attune you to some of the mechanics at play, it will not "immunize" you against them. You'll still be just as susceptible to a skilled comedian's ability to make you laugh. You will, however, become a more discriminating audience member...you'll start to see the difference between a good comic and a mediocre one. You will start to favor the comedians who are really dedicated to their craft. You'll start to become impatient with comics who aren't. You'll stop accepting easy laughs. You'll start gravitating towards the comics who make you think. So although this book exposes some of the workings, that's actually good for comedy and not bad for it. Smarter audiences make better comedy, in my opinion.)

Okay, so now you've got the book and you've read it. (Maybe that's not true, but we're pretending.) What do you do to sharpen your comedic skills as a novelist?

1. Consume comedy. Lots of it. Watch stand-up comedians at work.
2. Think more like a comedian as you consume the comedy. As you're enjoying the comedian at work, think more like the people at the back of the room. Notice how the nuts-and-bolts are being applied.
3. Consume written comedy. Lots of it. Unless your goal is to go into stand-up, what you're really trying to do is to develop a skill-set that works on paper. So you need to read work by people who have made readers laugh. Mark Twain is an obvious choice, but there are also others, and you need to find writers who make you laugh and get to understand how they do it. A great sampler book for getting started on this path is Laughing Matters by Gene Shalit. It's out of print, but you can still snag a used copy from Amazon. Another good resource is The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said by Robert Byrne. It's a quote book, but it includes some of the wittiest things people have ever said over the years.

A few caveats:

Learn the patterns and techniques. Never copy the material. Stealing jokes is an absolute no-no, both in stand-up and in writing. The goal here is to learn how it's done so that you can do it better yourself. The goal is not to find funny things to use as your own. Don't plagiarize--it will destroy you. (Or worse, Joe Rogan will hunt you down.)

Do not mistake the ability to write funny with the ability to perform funny. If you want to pursue stand-up comedy, by all means go for it. But understand that that is a completely different pursuit with its own requirements and learning curves. If you want to become funny on the stage, you have to put in the "stage time." Years of it. You can't become a comedian from an armchair. And remember--stand-up comedians are serving up humor in highly-concentrated doses. Novelists are aiming for a far more diluted product in the service of the story.

You can, however, improve the quality of your "novelist funny" from an armchair, if you are willing to put in the "page time." But just like our friends onstage, we have to take it seriously and approach it as a craft. And as novelists, it means we have to hit the books...lots of books.

Any comedian will tell you that being funny is work. But I would argue that for a novelist, it is work well worth doing. Your characters will become more relateable, your dialogue will crackle with life, and your readers will be begging for more when they reach "The End."

This concludes our foray into the business of funny. In our next few posts, we're going to flip the script and start pushing the reader's fear buttons.

I know, I know. It's a 180-degree head rotation from Dwayne Perkins to Linda Blair. But you've been warned.

Up next: Scare me, Baby! Again and again!

Writing Funny Part 5

Don't Tell Your Character That Everyone Else Is Laughing

(This is a fifth post in a six-part series on being funny in novels. To start at the beginning go here.)

We're going to let Mr. Perkins take a breather for this post and instead draw your attention to five famous YouTube clips. You've already seen them all, so I'm not going to embed them. I'll just list them below:

• Chocolate Rain
• Dave After Dentist
• Leave Britney Alone
• Bed Intruder
• Charlie Bit My Finger

(I told you you've already seen them.)

All of these videos went viral in their day. Each one is unique, but all of them have the same thing in common: (1) The main character in the video does or says some incredibly funny things, and (2) they have absolutely no idea that what they are doing is, in fact, funny.

In the Antoine Dodson video ("We gone find you!"), Antoine is not joking -- his sister has nearly been raped, and he's mad as hell about it. There's nothing funny about the situation at all. What is funny is the manner in which he expresses his outrage and promises revenge on the would-be rapist.

In the Chris Crocker video ("Leave Britney Alone!") again, Chris is absolutely not being funny. He is distraught about the press and perceived harassment against Britney Spears, and his sympathy for her situation is palpable and sincere. What make this video funny is the level of emotional capital he has placed on a celebrity he's never met and his complete lack of hesitation in expressing it in extremely emotional terms.

Chocolate Rain is funny precisely because of the complete earnestness Tay Zonday exhibits in the course of playing his magnum opus.

And so on. You get the idea.

The fact is that people in real life sometimes say and do the funniest things when they are not feeling funny at all. Wry comments fueled by genuine anger are far funnier than wry comments fueled by the desire to appear clever. Creative name-calling becomes seemingly more creative when the name-caller is in the throes of their outrage at perceived betrayal. People in terrifying situations can find themselves making observations and comments which, if they were not in fear for their own lives, might make them laugh out loud.

Life inside the snowglobe isn't funny to the people inside. But it can be hilarious to the people on the outside looking in. And novelists are uniquely positioned to use this comedic dynamic to great effect.

Of course, you may be wondering whether laughter is appropriate in life-or-death situations. After all, if your hero or heroine is in mortal peril and they make a remark that amuses the reader, won't that break the spell? Won't that destroy the suspense and tension you've worked so hard to create? Won't that undercut the raw emotion in the scene?

Not necessarily. Fear and anger can work with laughter perfectly well. Take it from Steven Spielberg.

Do you remember the shark's first real appearance in Jaws? It may have been a while since you've seen it, so I'll give you a quick refresher.

For most of the movie, of course, we do not actually see the shark. In fact, it's not until our heroes have departed for sea (and been out there a while) that we see more than a dorsal fin. Some of this was intentional, and some of it was from the technical difficulties the film crew had with making the darn thing actually work. But when Bruce (yes, the film crew called him "Bruce") actually showed himself in all his sharkish glory, the movie theater audiences met him with a solid scream.

Here's the thing about that scream, though. Right before the shark pops out of the water behind the boat, Chief Brody makes a smart remark to the captain about his shark-chumming duties. His actual line is "Come on down here and chum some of this shit."

These days, the word "shit" would hardly get a response of any kind. But in 1975, such language was still fairly new in movies, and it had just enough shock value to make the audience laugh. The laughs turned into screams when the shark popped up immediately afterwards, and it was Spielberg's view that the laugh in fact helped power the scream that followed.

And we see plenty of other examples in movies as well. The entire Scary Movie franchise is built around mixing fear with comedy. Alfred Hitchcock got a famous laugh in the original Psycho when Norman Bates was ditching his victim's car in the swamp. The car was sinking, then stopped for a few uncomfortable moments, then resumed sinking, much to Norman's relief. The look on Norman's face when the car stopped sinking was comedic gold, and it did absolutely nothing to detract from the incredible tension the audience was feeling.

So don't be afraid of the funny, even in situations where the protagonist is feeling anything but. In fact, some of your protagonist's strongest negative emotions can present comedic opportunities.

People Say Funny Things When They're Angry.

When I was a wee lad, I used to take a city bus to choir practice in my hometown. One day, a woman got on the bus and couldn't produce the correct change. She tried to give the driver a bill, but he refused it. He let her take a seat anyway, but something in his attitude sparked her ire, and just before heading to her seat, she snapped at him with the following:

"I'm doing the best I can! Y'all don't take checks."

I couldn't help myself. I blurted out laughing.

"What's so funny?" she snapped, and stomped to her seat.

What was funny to me was the line she said in combination with the tension of the moment. The combination of her anger and the unexpected nature of the comment combined to make the line funnier than it would have been in any other situation.

People Say Funny Things When They're Scared.

"I hate snakes!" -- Indiana Jones, dangling above a snake pit in Raiders of the Lost Ark. 'Nuff said.

So don't be afraid of the funny.

In our next post, we'll wrap this up with a few tips for developing your funny bone as a novelist.

Writing Funny Part 4

The Snow Globe

(This is a fourth post in a six-part series on being funny in novels. To start at the beginning go here.)

Before we get into the situations in a novel that most naturally lend themselves to humorous treatment, I'd like to introduce you to a concept that I call the "Magic Snow Globe."

Since Dwayne's YouTube clips have been so helpful in illustrating concepts so far, we'll start with another one:


In this clip, we see something interesting. There are actually three characters in the clip.

We might refer to the first character as "Dwayne-Now." This is his baseline persona, the manner in which he presents himself onstage. It very likely tracks closely with who he is most of the time on- and off-stage, with a few tweaks here and there. He might edit some parts of his normal personality out of the baseline persona (maybe he gets grouchy at times in real life but decides he's not interested in presenting that onstage), and he might augment a few key aspects as well. But basically, it's him.

The second character is a guy we might call "Dwayne-Then." It's basically Dwayne injected into a comedic situation, in this case, introducing his new girlfriend to his family.

The third character is of course Laqueeta, the new girlfriend.

So, here's what happens:

Dwayne-Now sets up the central problem of the story. He then slips into the character of Dwayne-Then, addressing his family as if they were standing on the stage with him. After introducing Laqueeta, he slips into that character, then back to Dwayne-Then. He closes out the bit as Dwayne-Now and delivers the final punchline.

In this piece, Dwayne has essentially created a miniature play, sort of like creating a snowglobe and showing it to the audience. Dwayne-Now is the snowglobe's creator, and Dwayne-Then and Laqueeta are like figurines inside the snowglobe that Dwayne-Now has created for us.

(Stay with me here. The snowglobe metaphor becomes important when we start talking about novels.)

Now, Dwayne has a lot of responsibilities when he's onstage, and one of his most important responsibilities is maintaining audience control. It's a skill that's learned by comedians over years of hard work, and it's one of the key things that separates a skilled comedian from a wannabe. It's also one of several reasons that an amateur might blow the doors off a YouTube following but crash and burn horribly in front of a live audience.

Because Dwayne has this responsibility for maintaining control of the audience, he can't afford to stay in the snowglobe for very long. But he can jump in for a few moments, illustrate the situation, and then jump back out into his Dwayne-Now onstage persona and retain control of the show.

Here's another point about being inside the snowglobe versus being outside of it: Neither Dwayne-Then nor Laqueeta have any awareness that the situation is funny. They are just trying to meet the requirements of the situation that Dwayne-Now has put them in.

Dwayne-Now, of course, knows that the situation is funny. He's the comedic persona onstage, and it's his job to know what's funny and what's not. He won't flaunt his knowledge, of course, because it's the audience's job to render the funny/not-funny verdict with their laughter or silence. But he knows what the verdict is going to be. He knows his material and has a very clear sense of the reaction he's most likely to get in front of any given audience.

So how does this apply to including humor in a novel?

Think about what life must be like inside a snowglobe. We're on the outside looking in, so it doesn't look the same to us as it does to the figurines inside. When we shake a snowglobe, we see a cute scene with tiny snowflakes floating around gently in the water-glycerin mixture.

But that's not what the figurines see. First they feel a massive earthquake, their world appears to turn upside down, and suddenly they're trapped in a blizzard with gail-force winds. Not to mention the gigantic distorted face that's staring at them and grinning stupidly as it happens. It's not cute or funny to them; it's real and terrifying.

And that's the critical point about humor in a novel: Never let your characters in on the joke.

In the next post, we'll look at some ways in which things can be funny to the reader when they are anything but funny to the character.

Writing Funny Part 3

(This is a third post in a six-part series on being funny in novels. To start at the beginning go here.)

When we talk about being funny, whether we're talking about onstage or in print, we often speak in terms of "jokes." But to really understand what is happening under the hood, it's helpful to expand our definition of what a joke is.

Most people think of jokes as an obvious set-up/punchline structure: "A guy walks into a bar..."

But when we watch skilled comedians at work, we notice that what they're doing doesn't feel like jokes to us. We are not really aware of a set-up, and when the punchline hits us, we usually don't think of it as a punchline at all...we just know we've heard something funny and we laugh.

If you re-run Dwayne's clips a few times and pay close attention to what he's doing, you'll notice that he doesn't follow the set-up/punchline pattern in the same way an amateur might use. There's no clear part where he says "A guy walks into a bar..." and then follows it with a single punchline.

This is because Dwayne uses a series of punchlines for each set-up, and each punchline builds on the previous one. If you watch the clip and note the times that people laugh, you will also notice that some of the lines get milder laughs and some of them get harder laughs.

In a very real sense, Dwayne is constantly providing the audience with opportunities to laugh.

In an optimal situation, where the audience is sharp and paying attention, Dwayne will get laughs with each opportunity he presents. In less optimal situations (for example, if the audience is too buzzed, or the club conditions are distracting, or the previous comic threw off the chemistry in the room), the audience might miss some of the opportunities to laugh. But since there are plenty of funny things being said, a few missed punchlines won't be missed by the audience. Dwayne has embedded so many punchlines in what he's doing that it won't even register with the audience that they were supposed to laugh.

And this is the lesson that novelists can take from skilled comedians: As long as the opportunity to laugh fits naturally in the flow of what you're doing, there's no harm done if the reader doesn't "get" it.

Or to put it another way: Bury the joke.

• If you write something funny, don't telegraph the fact that it's supposed to be funny. Don't underline or emphasize it in a way that says "this is funny."
• Never deviate from the story or the character in order to get a laugh. If the funny thing you've come up with doesn't fit naturally into the flow of what's happening, toss it out.
• Make sure that everything you write has a storytelling purpose above and beyond being funny, so if it doesn't strike the reader as funny, they won't even notice that an attempt was made.

In the next post, I'll introduce you to the Magic Snow Globe, and we'll look at how it applies to being funny in print.

Writing Funny Part 2

In the previous post, I outlined some advantages that novelists have over comedians when it comes to being funny. Now it's time to put the shoe on the other foot and explore some of the advantages that comedians have over novelists.

Let's start with another clip of Dwayne at work. In this clip, he is doing the "win-or-go-home" material that you may have seen in the longer clip from the previous post:



In this clip, we see a few of the tools that Dwayne can bring to the table that are not in the novelist's repertoire.

The first tool, of course, is comic timing. When delivering his material, Dwayne controls how the material is delivered. In the clip above, you can see how he makes the audience wait at certain points before delivering the next line. This has the effect of heightening the tension in the room and creating anticipation about what he's going to say next.

When Dwayne says, "This is the playoffs, Baby," and then repeats the line, he stretches out the pause between "playoffs" and "Baby" to such a degree that it has one of two effects: Some of the audience members don't see it coming, and the surprise of hearing "Baby" again makes them laugh. Other audience members see it coming, and the anticipation makes them laugh as a form of release when he finally says the word.

Another tool Dwayne has at his disposal is his vocal inflection and facial expressions. His impersonation of the win-or-go-home football player is dead-on funny (we've all seen these guys on TV), and his use of eye contact with the audience raises the comic tension further.

Dwayne has one other tool in the box that might not be obvious: The group dynamic within the audience itself. Not all the audience members are likely to get all the jokes in exactly the same way. But if half the audience is laughing, the laughter has the effect of cuing the other half that something funny has just been said. This helps the "slow half" find the comedy that they might not have found on their own.

Novelists don't get these tools, obviously. Our books are usually read as a solitary activity, which eliminates the group dynamic, and the reader, not the writer, brings their own inflections and imagery to the process of reading from the printed page.

But even though Dwayne has some tools at his disposal that we as novelists can never use in our own work, there are certain techniques he does use that are equally applicable to the printed page, and we will explore some of them in our next post.

Writing Funny Part 1

There's something about laughing with a person that bonds us to them, and since novelists are very much in the business of making readers bond with characters, humor can be a powerful weapon in a novelist's arsenal.

In these next few posts, I am going to outline some of my own thoughts on how humor can work in a novel. But I need to start with a critically important distinction.

I'm Hilarious But I'm Not a Comedian: Novels versus Comedy

I'm a huge fan of stand-up comedy, and I am grateful to consider Dwayne Perkins (who is both hilarious and a comedian) a friend. I've been a fan of his blog for years, and he was kind enough recently to collaborate with me on a guest blog post for I Smell Sheep, a blog for fans of paranormal fiction.

Dwayne has made me laugh out loud on numerous occasions, and I have made him laugh on a few occasions as well. But Dwayne has been doing stand-up comedy for years, he knows what it takes to master the craft, and he also knows that he won't be handing me a microphone anytime soon. And I have enough sense to leave the microphone in the hands of the professional.

But fortunately, I don't have to be a professional comedian to be funny in print. I do need to have a sense of humor, obviously, and I do need to approach it as a craft. But the game of being funny on the page versus on the stage is a very different game, and as a novelist, I have a few factors working in my favor.

Advantage #1: If I make the reader laugh once or twice in the course of a novel, I'm regarded as a comic genius. If Dwayne makes the audience laugh only once or twice in a set, he's just had a really, really bad night.*

(* Fortunately Dwayne has taken his craft to a level where I suspect this doesn't happen. His off-nights are better than many comedians' good nights.)

Advantage #2: If I do a good job of burying my jokes in the story, the ones that fail won't be noticed as failures--they'll just be viewed as part of the storytelling.

Advantage #3: I have all the time in the world to set up the joke.

Advantage #4: The set-up doesn't even look like a set-up, so the joke feels spontaneous.

The primary difference in the advantages outlined above, of course, is a simple matter of expectations. When Dwayne takes the stage, the audience expects to laugh...that's why they paid their money and bought their two drinks. So Dwayne has to deliver the funny; it's why they're there in the first place. And he has to do it consistently. Comedians measure their material in laughs per minute, just to give you an idea of the constraints they work under.

Novelists, however, do not work under any similar requirements. We're storytellers, and our job is to take the reader on a journey, bring them into our protagonist's world, and leave them with a sense of emotional and intellectual satisfaction. Humor is only one of the range of emotions we bring to the reader, and they therefore do not expect for us to keep them laughing the whole time. Indeed, they probably don't want us to. For us, humor serves the dramatic functions of comic relief and character insight rather than the main course of what we're trying to accomplish in our storytelling.

So even if you're not ready to be booked at the local Improv, you have a number of factors that allow you to be funny on paper.

However, as a performer, Dwayne has a few tools at his disposal that novelists do not have, and we'll cover those considerations in the next post. Then we'll tie it all together and try to come up with some practical advice for novelists seeking to bring the funny into their work.

Before we get to that, though, let's take a Dwayne Perkins break:

Baking a Three-layer Character Hollywood Style

Because I seem to be all about revealing my sources today, I'd like to point you to another book I didn't write by someone else who does not know me from Adam.

(Screenwriters and aspiring screenwriters may wish to take a break--Coke or coffee, depending on your preference--You probably already know about this guy.)

His name is Robert McKee, and he is the author of Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. I highly recommend this book.

I can't do justice to the principles in Mr. McKee's book here, but I can lay out one basic idea that helped me tremendously as I was writing my novel. And that basic idea is this: Characters operate on three different levels.

• How they want the world to see them.
• How they see themselves.
• How they really are.

In terms of plot, this can crudely be translated as follows:

• What the character says they want.
• What the character thinks they want.
• What the character really needs (and ultimately discovers about themselves in the course of the story).

And by working the tension between what the character thinks they want versus what they really need, you can create the internal conflict and leave the reader with a emotionally satisfying ending.

You'll need to go to Mr. McKee's book to get the full details, but it's well worth several reads. I think it's as applicable to novels as it is to screenplays.

The Third Person Jedi Mind Trick

I'm going to kick this off by plugging a book which I didn't write by someone who does not know me from Adam.

The book is called How Fiction Works, and it's written by someone named James Wood, whom I assume is a professor of some type. I assume he has a Ph.D., so I'll call him "Dr. Wood" for the rest of this post.

Dr. Wood's book studies some of the greatest examples from literature, and he drives his point home with more examples than I have room for here, but he makes a few simple points that I believe can make any writer's work better:

• Third person can get your reader closer to the character than first person.
• Third person allows you to play a cool Jedi-Mind Trick on the reader.

Huh? Third person is closer than first person? Really?

Really. Here's why:

When the narrator speaks in first person, it is true that they can share their inner thoughts as the story unfolds. But as they do so, they also bring their own biases and filters to the storytelling.

Let's face it: People almost never say exactly what they are thinking in real life. They filter, modify, and edit to make what they say more acceptable to those who are listening and (more significantly) more acceptable to the ways in which they wish to see themselves.

So when you're reading a first-person account of anything, you are naturally running everything they say through that filter...second-guessing their motivations for saying what they are saying.

But third-person intuitively feels more authoritative to the reader. We tend to think of the third-person as an all-seeing reporter, a voice of God, if you will. So we are more likely to let our guards down when reading the third-person account. We're more likely to take it at face value.

But how do you get the inner action of the character in a third-person voice? How do you make the reader feel as if they are sitting on the character's shoulder, seeing the same action, thinking the same thoughts, and feeling the same emotions that the character is experiencing?

This is where Dr. Wood's Jedi Mind Trick comes into play. It's wonderfully simple:

When the camera is following a specific character, the narrator shifts into that character's mode of speech.

That's it. Of course, Dr. Woods goes into depth about how this works and why this works, and he gives lots of examples that help you get a feel for it. But that's the basic idea.

Let's make this fun!

This is a blog about writing, but not just any kind of writing.

This blog is dedicated to writing that entertains. Nothing more. Nothing less.

It's not about writing that impresses. It's not about writing that wins respect and awards. It's not about writing that causes people to furrow their brows, nod sagely, and wax pseudointellectual.

And most of all--most of all--it is not about writing for self-validation, or as a form of therapy, or as a way to expunge your childhood demons. It is not about writing to get something off your chest.

It's about writing to grab readers, take them on a fun ride, and leave them breathless and happy.

It's about writing stories that make readers say things like this:

This book surprised me. I don't quite know how to rate it.
If I were wearing my professional academic hat, I'd probably give it two stars...
I've settled on giving this book 4 stars because it's damned entertaining...

I can honestly say I never read a book quite like it...I was rooting for the main character while he was taking me on this wild and crazy ride.

I read it in less than three hours.

These are actual reader reviews I've received for my novel, although the purpose of this blog is not to plug my novel. (Okay--I'll plug it a little bit--it's Death Ain't But A Word, and it's brilliant, in my completely unbiased opinion). Nor is it to set myself up as some sort of guru.

(Gurus, in my opinion, are terribly overrated.)

Rather, it's a place to share what I've learned so far in this process, what I'm still learning, and to learn from you as well.