I would like to share a Guest Piece from Norma Watkins How to Share the Hard Stuff
How to write about things you’re ashamed of, afraid of, the things that wake you up at night or give you bad dreams? How to write about trouble? Because this is what readers’ want. Happiness is boring, but we’re fascinated by trouble. We want to see how you got through it, how skillfully or clumsily you handled it, and how you came out the other side, if you did. We want to accompany you on a scary journey from the safe distance of the printed page.
One way is through humor. Make it funny and you can tell us anything. Laugh at yourself and we laugh with you, not at you.
In his memoir Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt describes as bleak a childhood as Dickens could imagine. He presents a world of painful poverty, parental abandonment, infant death, alcoholism, and class prejudice. Not light subjects. But McCourt’s book is hilarious at points and wry at others. If it had a subtitle, that might be “grinning through the sadness.”
How to write funny? Here are a few basic elements. Use juxtaposition. If you’re describing yourself as ugly, stand next to a goddess and juxtapose the differences. In his book A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson decides to hike the Appalachian Trail. He lures a friend along. Here’s how he sees his friend exiting a plane at a New England airport:
Katz was arrestingly larger than when I had last seen him. He had always been kind of fleshy, but now he brought to mind Orson Welles after a very bad night. He was limping a little and breathing harder than one ought to after a walk of twenty yards.
“Man, I’m hungry,” he said without preamble and let me take his carry-on bag, which instantly jerked my arm to the floor.
“What have you got in there?” I gasped.
“Ah, just some tapes and shit for the trail. There a Dunkin Donuts anywhere around here? I haven’t had anything to eat since Boston.”
This is intentional juxtaposition. When it’s unintentional, it’s called irony—which literally means, using words to suggest the opposite of their meaning. Incidents can also produce the opposite of their intent. James Thurber writes about the night the bed fell. His father decides to sleep in the attic to be away where he can think. The bed falls and no one sleeps. That’s ironic.
Another form of humor is exaggeration. Some people just naturally exaggerate. Dave Barry for one. Here is a paragraph from his review of the year 2022.
Ukraine is a nation that, through poor planning, is located right next to Russia. This is unfortunate because Russian President Vladimir Putin, a man who relaxes by putting kittens into a food processor, has long wanted to establish closer ties with Ukraine, in the same sense that a grizzly bear wants to establish closer ties with a salmon.
You can use exaggeration to transform what might be pitiful into hilarity. In my novel In Common, I use exaggerated internal dialogue to loosen the constraints binding the two main characters. Lillian and Velma may live restricted lives, but their thoughts fly free.
In Let’s Not Go to the Dogs Tonight (a memoir I highly recommend), Alexandra Fuller describes her childhood in Rhodesia with a crazy mother. Here’s how it opens.
Mum says, “Don’t come creeping into our rooms at night.”
They sleep with loaded guns beside them on the bedside rugs. She says, “Don’t startle us when we’re sleeping.”
“Why not?”
“We might shoot you.”
“Oh.”
“By mistake.”
“Okay.” As it is, there seems a good enough chance of getting shot on purpose. “Okay, I won’t.”
Fuller goes on to describe trying to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night without being shot.
Humor is everywhere, but capturing it is not easy. It’s often a matter of presentation. Avoid looking down at your subject. Be gentle when mocking. Don’t be mean-spirited. Don’t take cheap shots. You need a story, not just a joke. The story always comes first. The best humor sneaks up on you like Fuller’s. Don’t ever try to force it. You have to be amused yourself. Humor needs to be honest. It lets us see something about ourselves, about our prejudices, about the silly world we inhabit. That’s the power of it—laughter in the service of truth.
In Common, novel
That Woman From Mississippi, memoir
The Last Resort, memoir
Thank you,
Glenda, Charlie and David Cates
