Before the post, I want to mention that I have a couple of appearances coming up in New York City and the nearby town of Chappaqua. You can check them out here on the website by clicking \u201cIn Person\u201d and then \u201cAppearances.\u201d<\/p>\n
On June 26, 2018, Raina wrote, Does anyone else have the problem where a simple, relatively lighthearted story gets so bogged down by serious\/heavy themes that it becomes a different story altogether, and not necessarily one you want to tell? My WIP started out as a relatively simple adventure about Snow White being resurrected with dark magic, but then it got complicated and went into some pretty deep issues about power, human nature, and society. And even though those are interesting themes that would be great to explore in a book, it\u2019s not what I want to do right now. Is there any way to dial back the \u201cseriousness\u201d of a work without losing the general story?<\/em><\/p>\n Poppie answered, I\u2019ve been wondering about that myself lately. One idea which I\u2019ve been using in my WIP fairy story is to make sure there is plenty of humor. My MC Lio and his friends are being trained to rescue fairies from dangerous situations where they could end up killed. But Lio is a coward, which can add a lot of comedy to the situation and still have a message to send. I also have a character who isn\u2019t totally comic relief but still has a lot of smart answers for every situation.<\/em><\/p>\n You could also NOT kill off beloved characters that play a big part in the story (although you can absolutely kill villains, and unimportant characters can die). In my WIP, fairies can (and do) get injured, but no one dies. You can have consequences, but not have them get dark, such as having a character struggle with survivor\u2019s guilt the whole novel.<\/em><\/p>\n Raina wrote back, I agree, humor is a great way to lighten things up. For some reason humor comes harder for me when I\u2019m writing YA (as opposed to when I\u2019m writing MG), but I think this book might need it so I\u2019ll definitely give that a try.<\/em><\/p>\n I\u2019m with Poppie that not killing off characters allows the mood to stay light. Death is such a buzzkill!<\/p>\n And what Raina says about YA versus MG humor is interesting. Young adulthood is a daunting time. The complexities that pre-adolescents may not see jump out at teens, and ways to cope aren\u2019t as developed as they (usually) become in adulthood. So the humor is different for the two groups. Here\u2019s a joke I completely adore that I think is perfect MG humor, though it works for all ages: A snail, attacked by two tortoises, is unable to describe the incident to the police. \u201cIt happened so fast!\u201d it says.<\/p>\n No sarcasm, no irony. We pity the poor, benighted snail even while laughing at its predicament.<\/p>\n By contrast, the saying, \u201cLife is short and then you die,\u201d is packed with irony and, I think, goes to the YA sweet-sour spot. I just googled \u201cironic jokes,\u201d and some of the ones I found work to my ear, like this one: \u201cI didn\u2019t say it was your fault, I said I was blaming you.\u201d Some are just nasty and unpleasant\u2013I\u2019d stay away from those.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a marvelous, very old (1939) romcom called Ninotchka<\/em>, directed by the legendary Ernst Lubitsch. The female lead, played by Greta Garbo, is a super-serious Soviet emissary of some sort. The male lead, played by Melvyn Douglas, tries to get her to laugh and fails utterly until he takes a pratfall. When he goes down, she laughs her head off. In my opinion, his spill is MG humor, and his humiliation at falling is YA.<\/p>\n Of course, these are gross generalizations. Some younger kids appreciate sarcasm and irony, and some teens continue to prefer slapstick and lighthearted humor.<\/p>\n But the message is that we can go dark and still be funny for the YA crowd. Black humor abounds in tragedy. Let\u2019s look at a couple of examples from Shakespeare:<\/p>\n \u2219 Hamlet\u2019s father comes back as a ghost, asking his son to avenge his murder. Dad is dead, but at last he\u2019s confiding in his son. Mom conspired to kill him, but see how pretty she is when she smiles at Claudius. Hard not to be happy for her.<\/p>\n \u2219 Romeo and Juliet are both dead at the end, but some other people never find true love. Aren\u2019t they really the ones to be pitied?<\/p>\n That was fun!<\/p>\n (Shakespeare does usually lighten his tragedies with comic interludes, but these are carried by minor characters, not the principals.)<\/p>\n Let\u2019s darken a different fairy tale than \u201cSnow White\u201d so we don\u2019t mess with Raina\u2019s plot. Cinderella marries her prince and on her wedding night finds out he\u2019s a vampire. She should have noticed his eager expression when one of the stepsisters cut off her heel to squeeze into the glass slipper (I don\u2019t think this is in the Disney version). After she\u2019s a vampire, too, Cinderella decides to get revenge on her stepfamily. She showers them with jewels and invites them to live at the castle. But sweet Cinderella still lives inside the vampire, and her two natures are constantly at war. Meanwhile the stepfamily members are as awful as ever. Everyone in the castle is vampiric. Cinderella goes back and forth between feeling she should protect them and maybe just scare them a little and remembering how beastly they were to her. I think this can be both funny and compelling.<\/p>\n Now let\u2019s examine dark humor. Something has to really be at stake. If we\u2019re talking about the premise of a novel or a story, what\u2019s at stake has to be important: a relationship, a life, a way of life. Whatever.<\/p>\n If we want to illuminate a dark story with humor, one way to get there is with an MC who sees the funny side of things, whether she wants to or not. We\u2019re not lightening our story. What\u2019s bad continues to be bad. For example:<\/p>\n \u2219 Our MC is on a spaceship with mechanical difficulties. The likelihood of survival is slim. She can still have funny thoughts: death just when she\u2019s figured out how to brush her teeth without getting toothpaste all over her forehead.<\/p>\n \u2219 She\u2019s on planet earth. The love of her life breaks up with her. She still cares about him and decides to set him up with the perfect person for him. She even thinks, What can go wrong?<\/p>\n \u2219 I\u2019m on my train home, as I often am when I write the blog. I imagine the conductor falling asleep and somehow (I don\u2019t know what conducting a train involves) making the train go faster and faster. People are flying about the train car. I\u2019m wedging myself under the seats because I\u2019m small enough to do that. I hope no one\u2019s been killed. I wonder if I\u2019ll survive\u2013and also wonder if we\u2019re going faster than the bullet train in some parts of the world. Are we breaking any records? I hope we are! I hope the famous black box is getting it. We may die, but we\u2019re making a contribution to humanity, and isn\u2019t that what everybody wants, for their life to have meaning?<\/p>\n You may not be rolling in the aisles, but you see the humor. It\u2019s all in the perspective of the character. Doesn\u2019t have to be the MC, can be a secondary character or more than one.<\/p>\n Here are four prompts:<\/p>\n \u2219 Try \u201cCinderella with Vampires.\u201d Cinderella doesn\u2019t have to be the only character with a sense of humor. The prince can have one, too. So can some of the castle vampires and a stepsister.<\/p>\n \u2219 Try any of my tragicomic ideas above, including, if you dare, a re-envisioning of a Shakespearian tragedy to make it funnier but still sad.<\/p>\n \u2219 Write a scene between siblings. One is ten and the other sixteen. Somebody in the family is gravely ill. Show how the middle grade child and the young adult approach a serious situation. Make both of them seek relief in humor. Show how they do it.<\/p>\n \u2219 The most troubling fairy tale I know is \u201cHansel and Gretel,\u201d since child abandonment sets off the story. Try your hand at a darkly humorous retelling for the YA crowd.<\/p>\n Have fun, and save what you write!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Before the post, I want to mention that I have a couple of appearances coming up in New York City and the nearby town of Chappaqua. You can check them out here on the website by clicking \u201cIn Person\u201d and then \u201cAppearances.\u201d On June 26, 2018, Raina wrote, Does anyone else have the problem where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[222,21,22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=984"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":985,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984\/revisions\/985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}