Funny or Not Funny?

I recently had what I thought was a funny experience with an editor, and I shared it at a critique group meeting. The first two people I told thought it was funny. The next person just looked at me and shook her head. She didn’t think it was funny at all, even though I was laughing at the situation. She thought it was unprofessional.

Who was right? We both were. I was laughing at a situation in my life that if I didn’t laugh, I would probably cry. My friend didn’t laugh because she put herself in my position and reacted the way she would have if it had happened to her.

Humor is a funny thing -- no pun intended -- and yet that rolled off my fingers as glib as if I'd meant it.

Each person, (insert each reader), has their own sense of humor, meaning that what you find hilarious, another person will tilt their head in a good imitation of the RCA Victor dog.

We've seen a lot of good tips for writing humor this month, and they are all valid. One consideration when writing humor is to consider your reader so that you pen words of hilarity that they will understand.

Do you write for kids? Then many of your humorous lines will include mention of body odors, weird mouth noises, and references to current movies.

Do you write for the older population? Then you can make reference, as I did, to the RCA Victor dog, and they'll get the point.

No matter who you write for, you will want to put yourself in their shoes, if you aren't in that demographic, and use references they will understand.

I once had a friend who claimed she had no sense of humor. People would tell her jokes and she never got them. If she tried to repeat a joke she’d heard, she’d mess it up in the telling. She never laughed because she thought something was funny. And yet she made people laugh. We laughed at her complete lack of humor.

Humor can lighten a harsh word. It can teach the reader a lesson they wouldn’t want to hear otherwise. Humor can ease the tension in a scene, and it can draw the reader into the story by allowing them to lose themselves in the fictional world you create.

And, isn’t that really the purpose of our stories?

What makes a Character?

When I was a kid, my mom used to say I was "quite a character" when she introduced me to her adult friends. I would smile and blush, and shuffle my feet around a bit, embarrassed by her flattery of my obvious gifts and abilities.

Only many years later did I learn that being a "character" isn't always a compliment.

This month, as we explore characterization, perhaps we should understand what a character is. Many of you are probably rolling your eyes just about now -- really, everyone knows what a character is, right? So go ahead, define it. Just what makes someone, or something, a character?

Our first reaction is to say it's a person who appears in your book. And that would be right. But what about if your book doesn't have any people? Maybe the story is told through a dog's eyes. Okay, so a character can be an animal.

If you read "The Old Man and the Sea", you will also discover a character can be a thing, as in this story, the sea, is. A book about mountain climbing could have the mountain carrying the job of being a character.

A character is any one or any thing that moves the story forward. It doesn't have to be a person. It doesn't even have to be a living thing. A character simply must move the story forward.

When you create characters that are people, it can be easy to get to know them, to use some of the techniques described in other posts, such as asking them questions. But, when your characters aren't people, knowing them, and therefore, telling the story through them, can be more difficult.

If you've ever listened to Kids' Point on AM910 (KPOF) on Saturday mornings, Nature Corner teaches us a lot about getting to know our non-human or inanimate characters. Every Saturday Uncle Bob interviews something from nature. They have birds and fish and other animals, and sometimes they have a star, or a kind of rock, or coral. Cool stuff. And they give it a life, a voice, a personality.

Creating memorable inanimate or non-human characters requires you to give them the same things your human or animate characters already have -- a personality. Give them an attitude, a reason for being, a purpose in being in the story.

In a current WIP I'm working on, one setting is the Brown Palace. Older than dirt, that building has a history, an attitude, an air of regency, which I am weaving into my story. I want to draw the reader into a genteel time in the past, where people thought different than we do now, they acted different, they had different expectations. And one of the ways that time was manifested is in the Brown Palace.

Take a look at your current work in progress and see if there is a setting, a building, a mountain, an ocean, that can tell an element of the story from a different perspective. I'm not telling you to have talking cars in your story, but, hey, Stephen King had a best-seller based on the character of a car, Christine.

Characters are everywhere, and they aren't limited to people. Look for an undiscovered character in your story.