Drawing from the Well
Chapters Edited: 2
Chapters to Edit: 7
Yesterday was crazy, but I still carved out a little time to get some editing done. Real talk: my first agent letter probably will NOT go out tomorrow. I would have to edit 7 chapters today and without knowing how much work will go into any or all of them, I am hesitant to say that I will finish today. If it happens, awesome. I’m emotionally ready to put my work back out there for representation. I just want to be finished editing before I do it.
Filling the Well
That Hideous Strength: 57%
Elegy: Page 16 of 89
Jessica Jones: COMPLETE
The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections: 40%
My time to read is so artificially limited right now. I hate it. I have plowed through my YouTube playlist, though, so I’m finally back to listening to That Hideous Strength on Hoopla. It’s getting good as the conflict ratchets up. I just cant shake the curiosity of why it’s so different and nearly disconnected from Malakandra and Perelandra. Perhaps that will come in later.
I also finished Jessica Jones yesterday. I’m satisfied with the ending considering it is the end of the show. Things are clearly moving on in the universe off the screen which COULD have led to a third season, but Jessica seems settled and I’m okay with that. Now to move on. I was going to watch the second half of the latest season of Vikings but it isn’t available on Hulu yet so next after that is Iron Fist. Let’s see how this season shaped up since it was canned so quickly and critically bombed.
Polishing the Well
As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, it was my wife’s birthday yesterday. We went to her favorite Italian restaurant for dinner and had a lot of laughs. And then I gave her the big gift which is:
This is an actual picture from Two Tails Ranch where I am taking my wife in two weeks to ride, feed, and love on an elephant. When she found out, she cried. So I guess I win. 😀
Well Chat
The Trouble with Eliciting Laughter
Humor is great in stories. It helps break up all the seriousness of a story and it also helps pull the reader into the world. Humor in reality is just as good. It relieves stress. It connects people. And it’s fun.
I LOVE to laugh especially when I’m reading. Finding something unexpected in a heavy story that makes me chuckle is one of the best feelings. Marvel is really good at this by using unexpected human moments to distract from the heavy themes of their movies.
Comedy is the unexpected. I once heard Michael Jr. tell it as taking your audience in one direction and then switching directions unexpectedly. For all the standup comedy I’ve watched and listened to over the years, this is accurate. You always laugh loudest and hardest when you didn’t see it coming.
So how do you do this in your writing?
The first thing is to make it natural. There’s a joke in Book 1 about cats. It’s quick and short and light, but it’s unexpected. With the conversation that was going on, to throw in some banter is unexpected and to have it be about something so heinous to Americans and natural to animals is doubly so. At one point, I tried to have a running joke between two characters but it felt forced. What’s the difference?
Setup.
Good humor in a book either needs no set up or is set up so gradually that it fits into the flow of the story until the punchline. Bad jokes break flow for the sake of their own setup. That was my pitfall. I’m going to work on humor more in my second book now that I’m more comfortable with how to work it in, but it definitely isn’t easy. Granted, some people just have a knack for this stuff, but I’m so submerged in my plotting and character development that humor is hardly natural for me. Hopefully these tips will help me, you, or all of us.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG