The Hilarious 2-Step Plan for Writing Humor in Fiction
12.9 هزار بار بازدید -
10 سال پیش
-
http://helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com
http://www.kmweiland.com
Talks about the successful premise of comedy in any book—and the two crucial steps to writing humor in your story.
Historical and speculative novelist K.M. Weiland offers tips and essays about the writing life to help other writers understand the ins and outs of the craft and the psychology behind the inspiration.
Video Transcript: Somebody once said the key to writing humor is realizing comedy is just tragedy turned on its head. In fiction, the success or failure of this technique largely comes down to tone. A man going slowly insane is horrible in Crime & Punishment and uproarious in What About Bob? This is true also on the much smaller scale of individual moments in your story. Even within a tragedy, you can slant the tone to allow for genuinely funny moments—and vice versa for poignant moments in otherwise light and funny stories.
So with that understood, what is the key to writing humor in your story? There’s actually two steps that you need to be aware of. I like to call them setup and switcheroo. Setup is basically just foreshadowing. You’re shaping your story’s events to indicate something hilariously bad is going to happen. In Vincent Minelli’s classic movie Father’s Little Dividend, he does this beautifully when Spencer Tracy’s and Joan Bennett’s characters head to the hospital for the birth of their first grandchild. Joan’s driving like a madwomen, breaking every traffic law in the book. Then when they arrive at the hospital, she jumps out and tells her husband to park the car. Naturally, we expect there to be repercussions for her reckless driving.
Then comes the switcheroo. As they’re leaving the hospital (turns out their daughter’s going into labor was a false alarm anyway), who should be waiting for them but a traffic cop. The audience is delighted by this payoff to the earlier setup. But it’s not hilarious yet. Meekly, Joan asks if there’s anything wrong—fully expecting, just like us, that she will receive numerous tickets for her crazy driving. But, nope, the cop pulls a switcheroo. Turns out good ol’ Spencer, who was an innocent and protesting bystander to his wife’s recklessness, parked the car in front of a fire hydrant. It’s a joke that’s set up perfectly with its foreshadowing, paid off just as the audience expects—and then switcheroo’d into something unexpected and therefore very funny.
http://www.kmweiland.com
Talks about the successful premise of comedy in any book—and the two crucial steps to writing humor in your story.
Historical and speculative novelist K.M. Weiland offers tips and essays about the writing life to help other writers understand the ins and outs of the craft and the psychology behind the inspiration.
Video Transcript: Somebody once said the key to writing humor is realizing comedy is just tragedy turned on its head. In fiction, the success or failure of this technique largely comes down to tone. A man going slowly insane is horrible in Crime & Punishment and uproarious in What About Bob? This is true also on the much smaller scale of individual moments in your story. Even within a tragedy, you can slant the tone to allow for genuinely funny moments—and vice versa for poignant moments in otherwise light and funny stories.
So with that understood, what is the key to writing humor in your story? There’s actually two steps that you need to be aware of. I like to call them setup and switcheroo. Setup is basically just foreshadowing. You’re shaping your story’s events to indicate something hilariously bad is going to happen. In Vincent Minelli’s classic movie Father’s Little Dividend, he does this beautifully when Spencer Tracy’s and Joan Bennett’s characters head to the hospital for the birth of their first grandchild. Joan’s driving like a madwomen, breaking every traffic law in the book. Then when they arrive at the hospital, she jumps out and tells her husband to park the car. Naturally, we expect there to be repercussions for her reckless driving.
Then comes the switcheroo. As they’re leaving the hospital (turns out their daughter’s going into labor was a false alarm anyway), who should be waiting for them but a traffic cop. The audience is delighted by this payoff to the earlier setup. But it’s not hilarious yet. Meekly, Joan asks if there’s anything wrong—fully expecting, just like us, that she will receive numerous tickets for her crazy driving. But, nope, the cop pulls a switcheroo. Turns out good ol’ Spencer, who was an innocent and protesting bystander to his wife’s recklessness, parked the car in front of a fire hydrant. It’s a joke that’s set up perfectly with its foreshadowing, paid off just as the audience expects—and then switcheroo’d into something unexpected and therefore very funny.
10 سال پیش
در تاریخ 1393/08/20 منتشر شده
است.
12,992
بـار بازدید شده