Writing Comedy

Here are a few notes on pointers received during the Listowel Writers’ Week course on ‘Writing Funny’, given by Gerard Stembridge.

When writing comedic prose the most important thing to convey to the reader is the comic idea. What is the comedic idea of the piece of writing? Can you readily define it for yourself?

Another important consideration is - What is the comedic idea worth? Does what you want to write merit a three line joke, a paragraph, or a short piece or does it have the “legs” to carry a novel without losing its effect and impetus? Would there be enough laughs and amusement for the reader to want to read it through to the end? This is an important consideration, as there is no point in “flogging a dead horse” for the sake of lengthening a piece of writing, that would not be funny.

You should find that your writing leads itself to the following analysis:

I/They

Do you tend to involve yourself in your writing or is your writing focused on ‘they’ e.g. spitting image characters, political satire etc.

If your writing tends toward the ‘I’, does the ‘I’ character have an idiosyncratic point of view, and, is it of itself sufficiently funny to be the basis for a successful piece of comedic writing?

Inside/Outside

Are you more interested in the stuff you create in your head? Does your interior monologue have “the legs” to keep the reader amused or even render the reader “legless” with laughter. Myles na Gopaleen was a successful writer of this type. Are you creating stuff just purely for your own amusement; would others find it funny too? This is a very important consideration.

So - does the action take place outside your head i.e. in the everyday world and would others be easily able to identify with it/find it funny?

Warm/Cold

Is your writing affectionate? Does it involve self-deprecation or does it tend toward the cold, leaning towards satire? It is important to maintain the “feel” and tone of your writing thoughout the piece, as the reader will feel less ambiguous about the piece and get greater satisfaction and enjoyment if the writer 'sets out their stall' - be it warm or cold.

If your writing tends toward the cold, don’t be afraid of that, you can carry the tone right through to icy cold to get across your point of view but be aware that you may not be liked!

Itself/Other

Is the idea or incident you want to convey funny in itself or are you using comedy for some higher purpose - like lampooning society, or making a political point?

When writing situation comedy one of the cardinal rules of creating sufficient comedic tension and possibilities is that the characters cannot escape the situation. Think of Porridge or Father Ted – prison and the priesthood mean the characters are stuck in their ‘situation.

Exercise

Think of a ‘situation’. Ask yourself why the characters cannot escape. For example, in ‘Friends’, the single friends need to share to pay the rent. In ‘The Office’, they work there. In ‘Golden Girls’ they are old, so naturally it is set in Florida.

Next choose your characters and write a short description of each character. Limit your characters to 6.

Next describe what they each want and show what conflict arises between them as a result. What is the comedic idea? Try to put the idea into one sentence. For instance: An incompetent hotelier with big ideas runs a small hotel with the ‘help’ of his wife, a Spanish waiter and an alcoholic chef. Does it have legs – i.e. would it last a season, or would it die after the first couple of episodes?

If the answer is yes – write the opening scene of your first episode.

With thanks to Gerry Stembridge for a great ‘writing funny’ course and to Listowel for a really great festival 2007.

© Bernie McCormick

Writing for Radio

Shaun MacLoughlin* - script editor and drama director for over 30 years - writes that if you remember only two things about writing for radio, they should be:

You are writing for a single listener (hopefully multiplied by many)

You should try to think of what can happen only in radio so that you explore the medium at its most imaginative.

Author Rosemary Horstmann** issues the following guidelines:

Your listener is, for all intents and purposes, blind. Your message is conveyed only through the sense of hearing. However, the right use of language will enable your listener to see, touch, smell and even taste in their imagination. How about: Helen found herself swimming through lukewarm cappuccino, each stroke popping milky bubbles and sending chocolate dust up her nose.

In broadcasting, your blank sheet of paper is silence. Every sound you drop into that silence will carry some clue to the listener's ears. Don't mislead them - they will resent you for it.

Your listener is obliged to take in information in the order they receive it. "If they do not immediately understand what has been said, they cannot look back to the beginning of the paragraph, or reread the previous page… For most listeners, the first hearing is the last, and anything misunderstood or missed is gone forever."

MacLoughlin, among others, points out that you must captivate your listener from the very beginning - it is all too easy to change channel or switch off.

If you are writing a radio play, know where to start it. As an editor, MacLoughlin has read thousands of plays over the years. He says that on average, page 27 of a 60 page script is where he usually finds himself thinking "Ah, this is interesting, at last. This is what the play is about… where the story really begins." This lead-in is essentially scaffolding which - if left in place - mars an otherwise sound construction. It is quite likely that long before page 27 gets an airing, the script will be drowned out by the snap of off buttons being depressed all over the country.

You may like to address the ending early on…

…Playwright, Peter Tinniswood says that if he knows the end of the play when he is a quarter way through, he knows it's going to work for him.

On the other hand, you may not…

…Colin Hayden Evans says that knowing the ending in advance would be like the tail wagging the dog and that often his characters take on a life of their own and dictate how events proceed.

Don't forget about sound effects - not only music and noises, but also acoustics which can help to set your scene - are you bringing your listener into a cathedral? A field? A graveyard at night?

Incidentally, Shaun MacLoughlin usually asks writers to ditch all unnecessary entrances and exits that are not vital for dramatic effect. He has obviously heard too many knocks and creaking doors in the span of his career. Where possible, let language do the work for you.

RTE gives guidelines and examples on writing for radio, as does the BBC Writers Room. Remember, you are not confined to writing plays and short stories. Sunday Miscellany provides a forum for anecdotes and poetry, and don't rule out documentary material. There is a lot of airtime out there waiting for you to fill it.

© Hester Casey

The Write Site

We've all read our share of books about writing, but my recent trip to the States brought home to me what an enormous range of magazines are also available on the subject. Borders Bookstore displayed a baffling range of periodicals for writers of all levels. After much thumbing and scanning, I picked two - Start Writing Now and The Writer.

With articles like 20 Ways to Make Your Writing Soar in 2005 and What Professional Writing Groups Can Do For You, The Writer was interesting enough to fuel a desire to actually subscribe to the magazine. However, I discovered that the magazine content is also available online at www.writermag.com

Start Writing Now was billed as An Introduction To The Writing Life. Its cover promised How to Spot Contract Flaws and Story Ideas that Always Sell. Now, how could a member of Eblana leave that on the shelf? It turned out to be a once-off sub-title of the Writer's Digest range of guides. These guides claim to have been publishing periodicals about writing for over 70 years. However, they are far from being dated, as evidenced by their website - www.writersdigest.com

If ever there was a way to surf yourself into the mood for writing, this site is it. With tips on improving your writing, finding agents and publishers, writing enquiry letters, and beating the dreaded writer's block - I challenge you to spend less than an hour on the site! It boasts its own Book Club, exclusively for writers, with each book being - yes, you've guessed it - all about writing. After you've bought and read all the how-to books and manuals and you still feel you might have something left to learn, you can always sign up for a Writers Digest on-line workshop. Here you can pay anything from $179 - $600 for an on-line course about anything from Boosting Creativity and Grammar Rules for Writers to Essentials of Mystery Writing, The Short Story or Starting a Novel.

There are a number of good UK-based websites for writers also. Check out www.write-link.co.uk which includes a number of competitions that I'm sure you will be eager to enter. Same goes for www.writers-circles.com The BBC also has an excellent writing section on its website that is well worth a visit, especially if you are interested in submitting work to the beeb.

You might also enjoy exploring www.thewritecoach.co.uk which is looking for writers to take part in a piece of research on whether writers can be trained to write better. For those agreeing to dedicate a few hours each month to their research, they offer free, on-line, one-to-one coaching*. (Of course if the research results eventually show that you simply can't be trained to write better, you'll have wasted your time, won't you!)

Finally, for those of you wondering what gifts to buy for the writer in your life, may I please direct you to www.coolstuff4writers.com

© Fiona Price

Call Yourself a Writer?

The first edict of advice establishing itself boldly at the top of self-help and how-to lists on writing is simply - write. It seems a glaringly obvious suggestion, but one which if not set out to remind most of us to do so at every given opportunity, is one that can get lost in the mire of technique, pacing, characterization, plot etc. These are all immensely important skills to be honed along the road to literary greatness, but quite useless while hanging around the street corners of our minds, kicking words up against a high wall.

Over the years I've encountered many would-be writers who suffer loudly in their quest to tell their story, but who grow quite silent when asked how much they've actually written. It's all in the name you see, a bricklayer lays bricks, an actor acts, a receptionist mans a reception and so on, but I can call myself a writer without ever having written a word. My delusional buck stops here.

Deserving to come second on the how-to list is joining a writers' group. This can be an invaluable support to the aspiring writer. True, they'll criticize the words that have been wrung out of me at three a.m. and force me to murder my darlings when I've just given painful birth, but it's far, far better than the criticism fired for not producing anything at all, for which they have an extremely good aim.

Recently I found it heartening to hear one of my writing colleagues say that he rewarded himself by writing. How wonderful, when sitting at the PC for most of us means a stack of Kit-Kats, a bag of cream caramels and a continuous flow of coffee to entreat even a courageous look at a blank screen.

But they say there is only one way to get rid of the blank screen - write.

© Caroline Brady

Cross Purposes

Anyone who has ever attended a writers' workshop is probably familiar with the kind of exercise where three random words are chosen from a hat or a book and used as the basis for a narrative or poem. This exercise is a variation on that theme.

Take a crossword, any crossword. Whether it is quick and easy or slow and cryptic will depend on your taste in crosswords and level of crossword solving ability.

Solve three clues, and use the solutions to generate a piece of writing.

If you prefer, solve the whole crossword. Write a story, or a poem, which includes all of the solutions.

I myself often find that a crossword clue or solution reminds me of a line of poetry. With certain crosswords, the clue itself is a quotation that needs to be completed in order to find the solution. Why not take this line of poetry or this quotation as an epigraph, and use it as the theme for your deathless work of literature?

Solving a crossword sparks off ideas and leads you to make unusual word associations. Harness this mental activity to ignite your creativity.

Above all, whatever you do, just write.

©Aoife Mac Manamon

99% Perspiration, 1% Inspiration

After too many years dabbling in writing, a few universal truths about the subject have now become obvious to me. The most important of these is that the production of a novel or book is hard work. Dedication to the craft of writing is always required.

Writing is often a lonely existence. The characters in your work should become almost real to you. You will probably be spending more time with them than with most of your "real life" friends. It helps if you like them and can even have a laugh while writing at times. You must have an interest in their lives and a commitment to writing their story in a way that does them justice.

Most writers, when starting out, have "a day job" that pays the bills, so discipline is needed when approaching writing. The other commitments in your life may mean that you have what appears to be very little time to spend writing. Start a diary today and keep a note of how you spend every hour. You will be surprised at how much time is squandered doing things that you value far less than writing.

Most professional writers say that they schedule their lives and their writing in the same way that any "nine-to-fiver" would. They may not actually write for eight hours a day but that space is there; on the other hand neither do they seem to acknowledge evenings, weekends, bank-holidays. In this way they are like any expert who, in striving to reach (and remain at) the top of their field, practices every day.

© Martin Baldwin

Come Armed

I would like to have a dictionary in my brain and be able to summon up any word on command, but unfortunately I suffer from an incurable disorder called laziness. This affliction, coupled with a poor memory, leaves me with wonderful words whizzing around in my brain whose meanings are whizzing elsewhere. Or, meanings whose words have crawled under the nearest brain cell and refuse to come out.

There are a few words that initially I had difficulty in remembering, but eventually something caused me to seal them in my brain for an eternity. For example Gregarious: adjective fond of company, because I had a university lecturer called Gregory who rarely spoke to anyone and ran off as soon as the lecture ended. At college parties, on the rare occasion he was seen, he literally squirmed under the pressure of having to converse. Therefore Gregory = not gregarious.

Here's another one. Mnemonic: noun a device such as a pattern of letters, ideas or associations designed to aid the memory, because M is for Memory and mine is not to be proud of. Where am I going with this I hear you ask? Well it’s simple. Words are a writers toolkit. The more available to you the better able you are to manoeuvre. Being able to spell helps to (sic), though thanks to spell-checkers, we can get away with that one. The tip for this month, is come armed. Talent and imagination are your legs, but a good dictionary and thesaurus can be your crutches. And if the muse absconds for a while, well at least you have a book or two to rest your weary head upon.

© Veronica Casey