Using Humour in Writing #writetip

I will be leading a writing workshop on how to use humour in all forms of writing at Octavo's Book Cafe & Wine Bar in Cardiff on July 2nd from 3pm to 5pm. It would be great to see some of you there. More details below and on this link.

Using Humour in Writing

Have you ever wanted to write humour articles, but didn’t know where to start? Do you want to know how to add a leavening of wit to short stories and novels? Make a non-fiction book more interesting by injecting light-hearted touches at appropriate points? Many editors are crying out for humour, but it is an underdeveloped skill. Those who master it find more opportunities come their way. Lorraine Mace will show you how to increase your chances of publication by learning how to inject into humour into your writing, lifting it above the average and making it stand out for all the right reasons.

Bio

Lorraine Mace is humour columnist for Writing Magazine, penning the popular Notes from the Margin. She was previously humour columnist for both Living France and Spanish Magazine. Situational humour is much in evidence in her children’s series of novels featuring Vlad the Inhaler. Under a pen name she writes crime and slips in the occasional bit of humour to lighten what would otherwise be very dark reading. She is the co-author of The Writer’s ABC Checklist, a useful tool for writers of all levels.

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Ailsa Abraham muses on aging disgracefully @ailsaabraham

I have a wonderful guest post today from Ailsa Abraham, whose novels are currently on special offer, so don't miss out.

Hello, Lorraine, and thanks for inviting me over. I thought I'd just have a muse about ageing today.

 

The warning there is real enough. I don't suppose any of us can resist giving our characters some traits that belong to people we know, or ourselves. I freely admit that the female lead in the Alchemy series, Riga, is modelled on a very much younger version of me. We can all think of male novelists who are obviously living out their fantasies through their work with heroes who can fly planes or helicopters, sail anything that floats, climb, ride horses and achieve everything perfectly. They may also be experts in various fields which would have taken two lifetime's study to gather.

This got me thinking. Suppose I were to write realistically? I would love to break into the crime genre because most of my life I have been involved with the police. No, I'm not a hardened criminal or drug baroness. My parents were both in the Metropolitan Police and met in training school where my father was mother's class captain. He eventually went on to Scotland Yard while she resigned her “wooden-top” job as a married woman. As he died when I was four, we were constantly visited by the local coppers making sure we were lacking nothing and often taking me for a ride in their police cars.

Even over here in France I managed to become an official interpreter for the gendarmes and customs. I must have “police family” in invisible ink on my forehead!

So if I were to re-cast myself as a detective would it work? Well...no! As I am a very honest person, going through the requirements of a successful character in that genre, I don't fit the bill.

Detectives are usually leaders of a team and popular with their colleagues. My Bipolar Condition would mean that I would be a big hit on some days and a pain in the proverbial when throwing hissy fits all the time on others.

Mental agility? No. Many bangs on the head have left me with enough brain damage to ensure that if I DO have a flash of inspiration, I must remember to write it down before I forget it. Chief Superintendent Abraham would need a full time PA to follow her around taking notes.

Powers of deduction? That would depend on how much distraction there was around. The same brain damage renders me incapable of thinking with more than one source of noise near me, for example, while trying to write this piece I have the TV on beside me and my Old Feller trying to talk. Cannot concentrate on any of them.

Instant availability? No, I can't just dash off to another country or district at the drop of a hat. It's the dog and cat, you see? They have never been away from us in their lives and it would kill me to put them in kennels. Jumping on planes to the States is out of the question.

Chasing baddies across roofs or jumping from boat to boat in a harbour? Come off it! Nearing my old age pension and recovering from various accidents and illnesses, I can hardly move some days. I don't think using Texas Ranger, my Walker would look too good in a pursuit scene.
 

I'd suggest that I might be an armchair old lady detective but Miss Marple has already been done... Miss Marple on a motorbike with a penchant for dressing up as a pirate? What do you think?

Bio and links

Ailsa Abraham writes under two names and is the author of six novels. Alchemy is the prequel to Shaman's Drum, published by Crooked Cat in January 2014. Both are best-sellers in their genres on Amazon. She also writes gay male romance under her brother's name, Cameron Lawton.

She has lived in France for over twenty years and enjoys knitting and crochet and until recently was the oldest Hell's Angel in town . Her interests include campaigning for animal rights, experimenting with different genres of writing and trips back to the UK to visit friends and family. She runs an orphanage for homeless teddy bears and contributes a lot of work to Knit for Africa. She is also addicted to dressing up, saying that she is old enough to know better but too wise to care.

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Unblocking the Blockage #writetip

Gerard Young is suffering from something many writers have faced. He writes: I have a problem and I need some advice. I have a crippling writer's block that I can't get rid of. I have some ideas for stories but when it comes to writing the story, nothing. What should I do? Would enrolling in a writing course help in any way?

Enrolling in a writing course might well be the answer to your problem, but I doubt it. If you have ideas already, but can’t bring yourself to write them, being on a course might add to your woes, rather than easing them.

There are as many reasons for writer’s block occurring as there are suggested ways of dealing with it. As I don’t know you on a personal level, I will have to put forward several things for you to try. I hope one or more of the following will do the trick for you.

Have a set time to write

Whether it’s first thing in the morning, an hour when you get home from work, half an hour during your lunch break, set aside the same time every day. It doesn’t matter what you write. The important thing here is to train your mind to accept that this part of the day is writing time.

Another trick under this heading is changing the time you’ve set aside to write. If you have already made the decision that mornings are your writing time, but it no longer works for you, change the time. Write in the evening instead.

Relax and stop looking for perfection

Don’t read what you’ve written so far. Just get on with the next bit. Turn off your internal editor. Many people stop writing because they cannot produce perfect prose in a first draft. Nobody can! Don’t allow the fear of imperfection to get between you and your writing. There will always be time to polish that imperfect prose. Get it written and edit it later – much later!

Don’t write

Sounds like a contradiction, I know, but maybe your brain needs time to formulate the ideas properly before you settle down to write. You might have so many ideas in your head that you aren’t able to decide which one you want to develop. Go for a walk. Take a train journey. Spend an evening with friends. Forget about writing for a while. You’ll come back to it refreshed and raring to go.

Read more

Reading helps the creative juices to flow. I find reading in a different genre to the one I write in is beneficial, but you might find you get better results if you read material similar to that you want to write.

Set deadlines with a writing buddy

Find a friend, online or in real life, who also wants to get back into writing on a regular basis. This works well if you lay out some ground rules first. Decide how many words per day, week or month you will each write. Then set deadlines for exchange of material. It’s a bit like running with a friend, or going to the gym. It’s easy to backslide when you’re on your own, but much harder to drop out if you’ve committed yourself to a word count and deadline with someone else.

Work on more than one book, story, article or poem at a time

This doesn’t work for everyone, but some writers find it easier to switch between works, depending on what moves them for that day.

Writing exercises

I’ll be honest, writing exercises for the sake of it isn’t something that would work for me, but I have been told that many writers swear by it as a way to overcome writer’s block.

However, there is one thing that I do, which could be considered a writing exercise. Try interviewing the characters you want to write about. Put together a series of questions and then write up the answers as if you were the character. I find characters come to life if I allow them to answer for themselves. Believe me, once that happens, your characters will live in your head, nagging nonstop until you write their story.

Make sure your writing space works for you

Is your desk covered in scraps of paper? Do you feel hemmed in and uncomfortable? If your work area doesn’t make you feel creative, it will stifle the urge to write. Spend a bit of time making your writing area somewhere you want to be.

Remember that writing is fun!

This is the biggie, for me. Most of us write for pleasure. It’s fun. We create worlds and people to populate those worlds. Then we make life difficult for them so that they have to overcome obstacles in order to succeed in whatever we have decided they should do. We have the power to make them fall in love, fall out of love, go to war, lose a battle, find a friend, betray a colleague, become a saint, sup with the devil, rise like a star, fall into despair. How can we not enjoy ourselves?

Let go of your inhibitions – write and have some fun.

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That which confuses ...

Seb from Inverness sent in a question over when to use that and when to use which. I know this is something that vexes many writers, so hope the answer helps.

Seb says: I’m not a novice writer by any means, but I can never decide what the rule is over that and which. Is there a simple way to remember?

Okay, the basic rule is this: if the sentence doesn’t need the clause (it makes sense without) you use which. If the sentence does need the clause you use that.

The car, which is green, has a manual gearbox.

The car that is green has a manual gearbox.

The two sentences look identical at first, but the meanings are not the same.

The car, which is green, has a manual gearbox. This tells us there is only one car and it has a manual gearbox. The clause (the words inside the two commas) isn’t necessary to illustrate the meaning. It is additional information and doesn’t affect the fact there is only one car and it has a manual gearbox.

The car that is green has a manual gearbox. This sentence suggests there is more than one car, but it is the car that is green that has the manual gearbox. The phrase ‘that is green’ is necessary to show clearly, of all the cars on the forecourt, it is the green one that has the manual gearbox.

The proper phrase for it is a restrictive clause because another part of the sentence depends on it. You can’t remove that clause (that is green) without changing the meaning of the sentence.

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Using Limited Omniscient POV

Geoff from Barnsley says: I want to write my novel using omniscient point of view, but the friends who have read a few chapters say they can’t follow what’s going on. I want all the characters’ emotions and thoughts to come to the fore, so that my readers know what everyone is feeling. Can you help me to write using this technique? I really don’t want to use limited point of view.

First and foremost, you have to give due to consideration to why you want to use omniscient point of view. Only by knowing why can you decide how and when to use it.

The structure in a novel using this technique is vitally important – even more so than when using third or first person point of view. This is because it is so easy to confuse and/or alienate the reader. You have to know when and where to use it and what effect you are aiming to achieve.

If you have information to impart that is vital to a scene, you need to open that scene in omniscient, so that readers know immediately they are being narrated to by someone who is not one of the characters in the book. If the omniscient narrator is a character, readers need to know that too, so that they can accept this voice intruding from time to time, or filling them in on details the other characters don’t know.

Don’t open with a character’s actions or dialogue, because readers will believe they are in that person’s perspective, which is then thrown off balance when an absent narrator, or one of the other characters, lets us in on their thoughts and feelings within the same scene.

If you want to use omniscient so that you can tell the reader about a period in time and its history, or a new world and future technology, it is fine to use an absent narrator, but you have to use it in the right way. You cannot drop an omniscient voice into the middle of a scene and expect the reader to know that is what you are doing. Open scenes with it and even close scenes in the same voice, but when actually in the scene itself, pick one point of view and stick with it.

Whether you have finished the novel or not, I feel you need to draw up a complete outline of the story. When using omniscient point of view, you have to bring your reader up to speed on the vital aspects, but leave out any details that are not important for the reader to know. There will be masses of information that you (as author) need to know, but that doesn’t mean your reader has to be informed of every tiny detail. You are there to entertain, not to lecture.

You still have to develop your characters or your readers won’t care about them or what happens to them. The reader has to identify with the characters, not the absent narrator. For each scene, pick one main character to follow. Don’t head hop around the minor characters.

Omniscient point of view does not mean giving all the characters the same importance in the story. It means using the unseen narrator’s voice wisely to impart knowledge that you cannot otherwise let the reader in on.

Read Joseph Conrad. He was brilliant at limited omniscient point of view.

Limited omniscient means you limit yourself to being in one character’s head at a time. If you really feel you simply have to change point of view within a scene, do so by showing the reader you have moved to a new point of view.

In a romantic scene, for example, you could open from the girl’s point of view. We see and hear what she sees and hears. We are her as she looks at the love of her life who she feels has betrayed her.

Then the boyfriend could reach out and take her hand, while telling her he has been faithful. In the next sentence you can move into his head as he observes her reaction. The rest of the scene can then be shown from his perspective.

However, once you’ve made the switch, don’t be tempted to move back into the girl’s head. Stay with the boyfriend until you move to a new scene.

True omniscient viewpoint (where we know everything the author knows) is extremely difficult for readers to follow and is almost impossible for authors to get right. Even experienced and much published writers struggle with it. By using limited omniscient you’ll find the challenge less stressful, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy.

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