Tag Archives: Humor

Season 18, Theory and Technique

18.11: Turning Up the Contrast With Juxtaposition

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Our deconstruction and categorization of tension continues this week with an exploration of Juxtaposition, which is a contrast between two elements that supplies tension by allowing the reader to insert themselves.

Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. It was recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.

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Try to add tension to a scene in your work-in-progress by inverting or juxtaposing elements.

When Franny Stands Up, by Eden Robins —MRK

Season 18, Theory and Technique

18.10: Anticipation is More Than Just Making Us Wait

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Last week we talked about tension, and promised that we’d be breaking it down into more pieces. This week we’re discussing one of those pieces: Anticipation. We sub-divided it as follows:

  • Surprise
  • Suspense
  • Humor
  • Promises

We talk about how to create anticipatory tension well, where the pitfalls are, and how this fits into the creation of our stories.

Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. It was recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.

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Look at your current WIP. Are there genre tropes that you can subvert? Can you pay off reader anticipation by delivering something other than what the genre has led the reader to expect?

Dead Country, by Max Gladstone

Career and Lifestyle, Season 18, Theory and Technique

18.06: An Interview With Howard Tayler

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Your Hosts: Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler

In this episode we interview Howard Tayler, one of the founding members of the podcast, and the creator of Schlock Mercenary. The first question: how did this twenty-year ride change you? And a later question: what comes next?

Liner Notes: We’ll eventually do a deep dive on the final three books of the Schlock Mercenary saga. You can read for free starting here.

Credits: This episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson

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Take an index card for each key beat in a scene you’ve written. Illustrate each beat with stick figures and smiley/frowny/angry faces.

Schlock Mercenary: Mandatory Failure, Function of Firepower, and Sergeant in Motion (the three final books available online), by Howard Tayler, colored by Travis Walton

Guest, Live Audience, Season 17, Theory and Technique

17.18: How to be Funny, with Jody Lynn Nye

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Your Hosts: Dan Wells and Brandon Sanderson, with special guest Jody Lynn Nye

So, you’ve decided you want something to be funny. How do you go about making that happen? Jody Lynn Nye joined Dan and Brandon at LTUE, and pitched this topic to them. And yes, it’s much more than just “delivery, delivery, delivery.”

Liner Notes: “It’s always more funny when Howard’s not here.” —Brandon Sanderson at LTUE 2022 (posted here for posterity)

Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson.

 

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Take a scene that you’ve written, and re-write it to be funny.

View from the Imperium, by Jody Lynn Nye

Archive Seasons 11-15, Guest, Live Audience, Q&A, Season 11, Theory and Technique

11.35: Elemental Humor Q&A with Victoria Schwab

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For our third Elemental Humor episode Victoria Schwab joins us as we field questions taken from our audience at Phoenix Comic-Con. Here are the questions:

  • How do you add humor to a serious story without breaking the tension?
  • How do I move beyond the “Dad jokes” and into properly funny writing?
  • When is humor necessary in horror?
  • Where is the line between a comedic book, and a book that uses humor as a subgenre.
  • How do you make dialog sound natural, while still sounding funny?

Credits: this episode was recorded live at Phoenix Comic Con by Jeff Cools, and mastered by Alex Jackson

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Write  a joke, and have each of your characters tell that joke. Find a way for them to tell that joke “in character,” in their style.

A Darker Shade of Magic, by V.E. Schwab

Archive Seasons 11-15, Season 11, Theory and Technique

11.34: Humor as a Sub-Genre

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Humor is present as an element, at least to some degree, in a substantial amount of the media we consume. In this episode we discuss some stylistic tools for applying humor  to our work, and how these tools can best be employed.

WX Trivia: Episode 11.34 represents a pair of firsts for us here at Writing Excuses.

  • It’s the first time we’ve had to resort to having Howard record a fresh intro to replace some missing minutes
  • It’s the first time we’ve had a graphic novel as the Book of the Week.

Credits: this episode was recorded by Jeff Cools and an audio-eating gremlin, then mastered by Alex Jackson and a crossfade brownie.

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Take some of the humor types, and rewrite a scene several times. Over-apply one type of humor with each rewrite, and take note of how the scene changes.

Force Multiplication: Schlock Mercenary Book 12, by Howard Tayler, Travis Walton, Sandra Tayler, and Natalie Barahona, with an introduction by Mary Robinette Kowal

Archive Seasons 11-15, Demonstration, Season 11, Theory and Technique

11.32: The Element of Humor

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“Talking about humor is the least funny thing you can do.” —Howard Tayler

You have been warned! and with that out of the way…

What is the driving force that gets readers to turn pages in a book that is primarily a work of humor? More importantly, how do we as writers get that driver into our books? We cover this, and provide some starting points for writers seeking to improve their humor writing, along with a bunch of neat techniques, and (as apparent from the liner notes) a long example for deconstruction.

Credits: This episode was recorded by Jeff Cools, and mastered by Alex Jackson. 

Liner Notes: here are the lyrics we cited from “Love is Strange” (Galavant). We’ve added superscript numbers from the Rule of Three exercise.

¹Love is strange,
And sometimes kind of gross¹
It’s embarrassingly gassy²
And it leaves its dirty underwear
In piles around the place³

²Love is rude, it has a sort of smell¹
And it thinks that you don’t notice²
And it blurts out things
That make you want to smack its stupid face³

³And it’s awkward and confusing¹
It annoys you half to death²
Then it grins that dopey grin
And you can’t catch your breath³

The full song is available here, for $1.29 (link provided out of courtesy to the original artists whose work we deconstructed for educational purposes.)

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Get a funny book, and highlight or underline appearances of the rule of three, and comic drops.

Death by Cliché, by Robert J. Defendi

 

Archive Seasons 7-10, Guest, Season 10, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses 10.6: The Worldbuilding Revolves Around Me (“The Magical 1%”)

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Max Gladstone joins us to talk about worldbuilding, and how many genre settings seem to revolve around whatever gifted, magical, or otherwise special sort of people our heroes and villains happen to be. Jedi, for instance. Consider, then, the plight of the “regular” people, like Han Solo.

We talk about how to tell whether or not this is problematic for the story you are telling, and how one might work with the trope in ways that make stories better.

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Think about the last time you lost at a game. What was the process of thought that led to your loss? Now, replicate that moment in the dramatic structure of the story, except the story isn’t about games.

Three Parts Dead, by Max Gladstone, narrated by Claudia Alick