Laughter is the best medicine. Ask anyone. Well, maybe not a doctor. At the very least, laughter is a great way to pull a reader into your story, to make them connect with your characters, and to strike the perfect pitch and tone. But using humor effectively is fiction is no laughing matter (see how easy it is to botch it?)

There is a great difference between making a reader laugh with a character and making the reader laugh at a character (WARNING: Literary references ahead). We laugh with Huck Finn when he outwits the King and the Duke, but we laugh at the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” when she leads the family astray, only to realize the house she wanted to visit was in Tennessee instead of Georgia. By laughing with a character we as readers are drawn to them, and we feel a connection with them through shared experience. But when a writer directs us to laugh at a character, we laugh because of the distance between us and that character. We know more than they do, we know better than they do, and we know what is to come better than they do. The humor arises from the reader being distanced from the actions within the story, rather than from situations where the reader feels like they are right there on the page.

Now I’m not claiming that you should never make a reader laugh at your characters. Flannery O’Connor uses this technique well in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”. We laugh because we can see the grandmother for the nasty, nasty woman that she is. This suits the writer’s purpose and fits well within the story. But it is Flannery O’Connor after all. 

Whether you are making your reader laugh with or at your characters, it is important to be sure that there is a purpose to your humor beyond being funny just for the sake of it. This is an important point for short stories, which have a very limited amount of time to make their point. It is less of an issue in a novel, though still worth considering. If your humor can advance the story or connect the reader to a character as well as making the reader laugh, then you’ll have a powerful story as opposed to just showing off how clever you are.

Few things draw a reader into fiction more than humor, but it can backfire if not used wisely. As Uncle Ben says, “With great power comes great responsiblity.” So make them laugh (or groan), but be aware of how and why you are doing it. 

I’m such a hypocrite. I say that I’m afraid of technology, but I own a smartphone so I can check my email and social networking on the go (actually, the prospect of living without Angry Birds was too difficult to bear.) My own handwriting is steadily suffering because I write on a laptop. I hate using snail mail so much that I groan audibly when I see that a journal doesn’t accept digital submissions (South85 does though!). When I talk to other people about my fear of these things, I tell them that I’m afraid of the disconnect that may come from relying on a digital medium as our sole form of social interaction. But, it’s really because I’ve seen Terminator too many times.

Continue reading One Day We’ll All Be Robots →

Growing up, I always admired my father’s Saturday morning ritual of washing the family car. Every Saturday, the bucket, rags, soap, and Turtle Wax would appear from his tool shed, and he’d go to work. Hours would go by as he washed and detailed the interior and exterior of the car, never asking or wanting any help from anyone. When I moved out for college, I found myself taking my car to the local do it yourself car wash with a handful of quarters to wash my old blue hatchback, gaining some sort of satisfaction out of scrubbing the tires,wiping the dashboard with protectant, and every so often changing the wiper blades. 

Continue reading The Power of a Writing Ritual →

In her essay “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf claimed that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” While Woolf’s essay had more to do with the lack of financial and educational freedom female writers were subject to, the title of this piece strikes upon an essential piece of equipment in the arsenal of any serious writer: a place to write.

Continue reading Shutting the Door →

I tried the exercises. I wrote in different rooms of the house, different times of day. I tried writing something completely unrelated to shake myself out of a rut. I freewrote. You name it; I tried it. But none of it mattered because I’d managed to write myself into a corner. Everywhere I looked, there were obstacles. Somehow I’d worked my way into a scene I couldn’t get past because everything that would come after seemed to hinge upon it. Everything.

Continue reading Writing Your Way Out →

What do you do when you get stuck on a story or run out of motivation or creativity? How do you refresh it? How do you get inspired?

I’ve been wrestling with these questions lately because my imagination has been quite stingy. Just last week, while I was working on a short story, my brain froze up. Instantly, I felt stupid and incapable of forming complete thoughts. I couldn’t figure out why this was happening or what to write next or how to form the second half of the piece. Every idea I came up with seemed obvious or lame. It was extremely frustrating and I went three days without writing a good word (and this is bad because I have some deadlines coming up).

Continue reading Rebooting Your Brain →

As a young girl, my grandmother would take me to pick out fabrics for the dresses she would sew for me to wear. My fingers loved to browse through bolts of soft cotton, rough tweeds, linear corduroys, and ethereal gauzes. I would hide within the racks, all the while feeling each pattern, each texture, each subtle pick of fiber. 

Continue reading The Well-Worn Book →

I have a few hundred Facebook friends. Out of all of them there are maybe thirty or forty who have any semblance of an interest in writing or literature. Fewer still actively write, and I would only consider sharing my early drafts with a handful of them. These ‘writing friends’ are not only writers whose work and opinions on craft I admire, but they have also helped me in many ways. They’ve pushed me through drafts I thought were dead in the water, broadened my reading horizions with books I never would have picked up on my own, and helped me improve my writing as a whole. I’m always happy to look at a manuscript they might be working on, or to be a sounding board for their new ideas for novels or short stories. These kind of relationships are the ones that have gotten me through the more difficult times of being a writer. Not that family and loved ones aren’t great, but there’s no substitute for a friend who is right there with you in the thick of it.

Continue reading The Importance of Writerly Friends →

A fellow-writer once told me that the ending of a story should be “surprising yet inevitable,” meaning unexpected, but not outside the realm of possibility. I’ve found in my own writing that the easy part is to come up with a good start or interesting concept but wrapping it up takes much more than a few hours, or days, or even months.

I was reminded just how important a clean ending is over the last two months or so. Every Sunday my father-in-law made me, my wife, and my mother-in-law watch a show called Life on Mars. It started as an alternative to watching him watch NASCAR but quickly moved to a ritual we looked forward to. Since the whole series only has 17 episodes, we moved through it fairly quickly.

Continue reading Life on Mars with My Father-in-law →

My husband and I were driving home from dinner the other night, our toddler snoozing in her carseat behind us, when the shuffle on my husband’s phone queued up one of my favorite songs, the Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four.”  As I sang along (a little too enthusiastically), one of the lines struck me as it hadn’t before.  McCartney suggests that on Sunday mornings, he and his partner could “go for a ride.”  Suddenly, I was trying to remember the last time I took a car ride recreationally.  The closest thing I could think of was a few years ago during our house-hunting phase, but even that was goal-oriented driving.  Not even our annual Christmas lights cruising really counted since we always have a plan, an agenda. 

Continue reading Queuing Up Quiet →