How and Why I Write Humor -- a Guest Post by Joanne Levy

So here I am writing a post about writing funny. There isn’t much funny in writing about humor. Even the word funny stops sounding funny if you type it enough times.  There.  It’s gone.  Funny is no longer so.  

On to the serious business of writing humor. 

I’ve been told I’m funny person (despite the above, which strongly indicates to the contrary).  In my opinion, that’s a pretty good place to start if you’re looking to write humor—you kind of need to know what makes people laugh.  I write my funny on instinct and don’t really think about it too much, so it’s hard for me to talk intelligently about how I write funny.  But I’ll give a shot.

SMALL MEDIUM AT LARGE, my middle grade debut, is about Lilah Bloom, a girl who gets hit by lightning and can then suddenly hear ghosts.  I guess it’s not a very funny premise, but trust me; there are a lot of funny moments in it.  Lilah is twelve, so that means there is a lot going on in her life, from puberty to starting to think about boys. Then you throw in some mischievous ghosts, including a meddling dead grandmother, and you’ve got the potential for a lot of really funny scenes. One of my favorites is when Lilah is at her friend’s birthday party. The girls are consulting a Ouija board:

     “Okay,” Alex said, obviously taking over. “Everyone put your fingertips on the thingie.”  

     We all did. Of course, except Anita, who was watching from her spot in the corner.  

     “Okay, Tamsin. What’s your question?” 

     Tamsin took a breath. “Who will I marry?”

     Everyone gasped. We all knew Tamsin was currently crushing on Tyler Landis, an eighth grader. He was an excellent hockey player who hoped to one day make it to the NHL. Alex liked to tease Tamsin that her future boyfriend wouldn’t have any teeth, but Tamsin said with his NHL contract, he’d be able to buy himself a whole mouth full of teeth.

     Personally, I’d rather my husband have his own natural teeth, thank you very much. But I guess Tamsin wasn’t bothered by dentures.  

      All of a sudden, the plastic thing started to skitter and move under our fingers.  

     “Oh!” Anita yelped.

      It was moving over towards the left side of the board.  

     “Where’s the T?” Tamsin said. “Oh. Never mind.”

      Suddenly the piece started moving back towards the center.  Toward the T. 

      I glanced at Alex, who looked at me and we both knew: it wasn’t being guided by any spirits.

I love the banter between the girls.  This is not a homogenous group of tweens—they are all different, bringing their own personalities to the table, making them a dynamic group to watch.  Their differences make their interactions a lot more interesting than if they were all similar personalities.  I think this is an important part of writing characters—make them different from each other to give opportunities for banter and conflict.  Even small conflicts, like discussing which boy is cute and why, can bring about funny conversations.

What makes me laugh most about this scene is Tamsin obviously moving the pointer. And she gets it wrong the first time, so has to adjust and start pulling the pointer the other way, still under the ruse that it’s the spirits moving it.  She’s not fooling anyone, but Lilah and Alex play along, letting her make even more of a fool of herself to ensure her crush’s name is spelled out by the ‘spirits’.

What inspired this funny scene?  Well, what inspires a lot of my funniest scenes: real life.  A very similar experience happened to me when I was a kid, probably about Lilah’s age.  A group of us had come upon a Ouija board and were asking it what boys in our class liked us.  I’m sure we were all moving the pointer around, and I even remember one girl trying so hard to discreetly move it to spell out her crush’s name, that her knuckles were white*.  Looking back, that scene is very funny to me, so of course I had to put it into a book.  

* (there is a chance that girl may have been me)

What about you? How do you decide what funny things make it into your book?


Visit Joanne at her website, www.joannelevy.com

Slangin' Rhymes Like Diddy

First off, I hate rap music, so don't read too much into the title. Diddy is basically the only rapper I can think of, or maybe Lil Wayne (is that the guy with two teeth, both of them gold?). Anyway, this post is all about slang as it relates to MG, and how it can help and hurt your writing. Example needed? Okay, here you go.

One of the things I really try to capture in my writing is making my characters “real.” We all do, I know. But not long ago, I believed I needed to include the present-day verbal ticks and mannerisms I hear all the time in my classroom. Words like “own” and “burn” and phrases like “rock my socks” found their way into my writing as a result. Not entirely bad in terms of the intent, since those words are chucked around my classroom like Frisbees on the beach, but the consequence was my writing was annoying to the reader, and these slang words also dated the book for future readers. And the way slang comes and goes, we might be calling a book with words like “own” and “burn” dated in a year or two. Heck, maybe even tomorrow. All signs point to: chop the slangish fat off the meat of the story and let the reader enjoy the tasty meal, and not cringe every time a sliver of fat hits the tongue. Hungry?

So I came to the shocking conclusion that my use of slang was actually hurting my story, not helping it. The cleaver came out and off went the fat. And you know what? I believe my dialogue still rocked the reader’s socks. Oh, sorry, there I go again, slangin’ like Diddy*. Or Lil Wayne. Or whatever.

How about you? What’s your take on the use of slang in MG?

* Um, is he still “Diddy” or must I add the “P”? Now that I think of it, maybe I should have used MC Hammer…or is he now “Hammer”? Is he even alive?

MALCOLM AT MIDNIGHT Trailer and Giveaway!

In two months (just in time for the start of school!) my middle grade novel, MALCOLM AT MIDNIGHT, will be in bookstores. Needless to say, I'm a little excited. Anyway, to help send Malcolm on his way, I’ve been tinkering on a book trailer. It's been done for a little while, but the end of the school year has been so crazy, I haven't done much about it. Until now! Project Mayhem seemed the perfect place to post it (try saying that ten times fast!). Anyway, to help celebrate, I'm also giving away an ARC. Please enter below.

So, without further ado . . . here it is: MALCOLM AT MIDNIGHT, a funny middle grade mystery starring classroom pets at midnight, complete with ghostly shrieks, school hijinks, instances of valor, the occasional cheese puff, and . . . footnotes.

More info:

• About the book, including what some very nice authors said.
• Malcolm on Goodreads.
• Malcolm was recently featured at the BEA Middle Grade Editors' Buzz panel! Here are some links to that.
• And finally, I learned a lot in making the trailer. In fact, I posted about 13 things I learned over on my own blog.

Thanks for watching!

~W.H. Beck

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The Power of the Page

We have all heard stories of some author or another falling asleep by the fire and having his manuscript destroyed. I think those days are gone forever. Some of us don’t even have drafts to drop into a fire. We might have accidentally erased things, or even had computers die on us, but when entire manuscripts exist, pre-publication, only in the virtual world, we find we have entered a whole new realm.

What is a manuscript? If it’s not something written on paper, what is it? And, suddenly, books are not even written on paper. We can carry around two hundred books in our pockets. This is good for fire prevention, since we store our virtual material all over, in all different virtual venues. But what about the romance of the manuscript? WE can’t sign ebooks. We don’t marvel over first drafts on our flashdrives. Will a flashdrive with a first draft be worth something someday?

As we mourn the passing of Ray Bradbury, Maurice Sendak, and others, could we imagine a world where their work exists only virtually? Think of all the handwritten manuscripts, whether they are in the hand of Dickens or Beethoven. When we see those scribbles, we feel the humanity. We feel closer to the ancient minds when we get to see the magic from the hands they led to create. Is all that lost forever?

I do print out a draft and hand edit. At least, I did on the last book. This time, I haven’t had the time so my newest book exists only in the ether and in my mind. No one will ever see my scribbles or the splotch of coffee or the reminder to bring a snack for my youngest that I jotted down in the margins. There’s nothing about the virtual manuscript that shows the humanity of the author.

Even in our diaries and journals, we are losing the intimacy of the hand. How many of us keep paper calendars or diaries? Have we lost something for posterity?

Perhaps there will be ways around this. Perhaps not. We can argue that it’s not how but what when it comes to something written. Perhaps the page will pass into oblivion and no longer be important in the world. But if it will no longer be important, we lose something. We may never again be able to feel the author, revealed, on the page.

Thanks for reading!

Eden Unger

STORY'S END Cover Reveal and Giveaway!

And the WINNER, chosen by Rafflecopter's random number generator, is: STACEY MOORE!  I'll e-mail you to get your mailing info from you, Stacey.  Thanks again, everyone, and happy summer reading!

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Hello Mayhemers!

I am thrilled to share the cover for Story's End with you!  Get ready to be amazed!  Brandon Dorman,  Alison Klapthor, and the entire team at HarperCollins Children's once again did a tremendous job!

I'd also love to give away an ARC of Story's End to one lucky reader.  If you'd like to enter, fill out the form below.  As soon as ARCs are available (I'm thinking July or August), I'll happily send one out to the winner!

Thanks for stopping by! a Rafflecopter giveaway