Twisting the rubber band....

My first issue of Writer's Digest includes an excerpt from the book Comedy Writing Secrets, 2nd Edition, by Mel Helitzer, with Mark Shatz. The article is entitled, "Realism & Exaggeration: Really, Truly Funny".

To be frank, I wasn't impressed with the excerpt: I found it uneven and unclear. I also didn't find the examples given by the author to be particularly funny nor effective. As a result, it certainly didn't make me want to rush out and buy the book.

The excerpt's clarity problems become apparent in its very first paragraph, which begins, "Humor only appears to be free-form. To the trained ear, it's predictable because it's structured."

Huh?

I had to read the first paragraph a couple of times to figure out that the word "appears" should be italicized in the first sentence, to make it clear that Heltzer is arguing against the unstated premise that most people believe that humor (or humorous writing) has no structure. Without the italics, I read the sentence as having the emphasis on the word "only", suggesting that the only way that humor appears to exist is in free-form format.

Confusing your reader does not seem to be a great way to launch an excerpt.

That being said, I did find that the Helitzer piece helped to confirm my own impressions of how to approach a successful comic novel. Helitzer talks about the important connection between realism and exaggeration in humor, pointing out that the two must be properly balanced in a truly funny tale. You must create a realistic background, he argues, and realistic characters, to make your eventual exaggerations that much more effective and funny.

I have just started attempting to write my own comic novel, my first. In preparation for this attempt, I decided to read a number of successful such novels from the last 15 years, just to get an idea of the elements that are common to all of them.

I began with Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project, followed that with Richard Russo's Straight Man, Lazy Days by Erlend Loe, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson and finished up with two by John Green: Paper Town and An Abundance of Katherines.

All very successful and all, on the surface at least, very different. To paraphrase Helitzer, however, "These comic novels only appear to be different."

In reading them, you see, I found a number of common threads:

1. All featured male protagonists;
2. All the protagonists were portrayed as "real" people, but each had a slightly exaggerated characteristic that made him different from the norm;
3. Each protagonist, therefore, was positioned as an outsider of sorts in their communities, such that they were able to provide a slightly warped but still fairly objective commentary on the world;
4. The humor in each novel flowed from the interaction of the exaggerated characteristic of the protagonist with the people and events he encountered; and
5. Each novel featured at least one hilarious scene where a series of believable, realistic steps leads to a bizarre, ridiculously exaggerated outcome.

As Helitzer says, "You start with a realistic scenario, then bend and distort it for comic effect."

In the books I read, it is the exaggerated characteristic of the character that, in each case, does the bending and distorting of reality.

In Russo's book, for example, his character (William Devereaux, Jr.) is an anarchistic academic who simply cannot take "the rules" seriously. The result: he ends up appearing on the television news, holding a goose aloft, threatening to murder it if the University does not cooperate; or hidden, urine-drenched, in the false ceiling above a meeting room where his colleagues are deciding his fate.

In Lazy Days, Bror Telemann has an exaggerated love for the theatre... and for master chef and author Nigella Lawson. This leads to arguments at tennis courts and late night forays into the kitchen to make Nigella's favourite dishes.

My favourite is in The 100-Year-Old Man, where the main character's old-style formality and politeness lead naturally, inexorably to a memorable chase through the country-side in an old bus, with a small-time criminal, a gangster, a sexy mature woman and an full-sized circus elephant along for the ride.

John Green's characters, like the protagonist in The Rosie Project, are both hyper-intellectual, socially awkward young men in search of love. It's their intellectualism that gets in the way but also tends to lead them into increasingly bizarre and interesting situations.

In all cases, the characters are based in realism, with only slightly exaggerated character traits. But those traits cause the characters to proceed down carefully designed, increasingly exaggerated pathways to end up in hilarious places the reader could never have foreseen.

In the case of Straight Man and The 100-Year-Old Man in particular, the writing was so skillful that I never once questioned the build-up to the crazy punch-line (the professor dripping urine or the elephant in the bus). It was only when I got to the punch-line that, laughing heartily, I thought: How the heck did this author get me to this ridiculous place without me noticing or rebelling?

As I work on my own comic novel, I will remember the lessons I've learned. I will start from the realistic and allow my character's slightly exaggerated trait lead me into hilarity. And I'll have Helitzer and Shatz (and all the other authors mentioned above) to thank if my book is a success.

Finishing novels you're not enjoying...

My partner asked me the other day, with no small amount of exasperation, "Why do you continue to read novels that you obviously don't like?"

I guess I was frustrating her by droning on and on about all the reasons I thought my latest reading project (John Green's Paper Towns) was a disappointment. It didn't help that, just two days earlier, I had droned to her about how I felt my then current reading project (John Green's An Abundance of Katherines) was itself disappointing.

The answer to her question, however, was fairly easy: I refuse to stop reading any book simply on the basis that I don't like it. No matter how bad I think it is, there's always something I can learn from it as a writer. After all, the book in question has been published; it has made it through all those vetting and testing processes (agent, submission, publisher, acceptance, editing and revision, publication) to arrive in my local book store, processes that I have yet to negotiate successfully with my own creative work.

For that reason alone, I can learn something from even the most disappointing published novel.

And John Green is a hugely successful, award winning author of numerous best-selling young adult novels. Even if I personally don't like his books, clearly plenty of people do, including agents, publishers, critics and readers. If I can't learn from someone like that (both positives and negatives), then from whom can I learn?

So I read the entire book and I make mental notes of the stuff that I think works really well, the stuff I think is less successful and the stuff I believe has made the novel commercially successful where I have been less so.

In the case of John Green, I can see much to admire in his books. He writes in a very smooth, easy, "readerly" way. He doesn't let his own cleverness get in the way of a good read, even though he makes some interesting and "writerly" choices along the way. In Katherines, for example, he includes any number of footnotes and graphs, items you rarely see in fiction, but he uses them effectively as a complement to the character of his narrator. They are "writerly" but used in a "readerly" way.

Both of Green's books I read contain scenes that I found remarkably engaging and fun and I think he uses the comic novel formula fairly effectively.

Even if I think his secondary characters (such as his narrator's best friends in each of the books) are two-dimensional and, frankly, replicas of each other (Hassan in Katherines and Ben/Radar in Paper Towns are basically the same person -- oh, who am I kidding, every character is the same from book to book, from his socially-awkward, school-smart protagonist to the street-smart, vivaciously bold female lead to the main characters' parents), I think he uses those characters well to build, in a natural way, very funny situations.

It's his plots that really let me down. They are all build up and no payoff. And, perhaps because I am of another generation, his insistence on concluding that the key in any life is leaving your past (and your life) behind for the open road and infinite opportunity makes absolutely no sense to me.

Nor does his predilection for extremely talky, wordy plot climaxes.

And, if I am going to nitpick, I am concerned that he is rather loose with his borrowing from other writers. In Paper Towns, his main character's comment about feeling "infinite" during a certain moment of daring is clearly an uncreditted reference to The Perks of Being a Wallflower and I'm sure the Canadian rock band, The Tragically Hip, would have appreciated an acknowledgement as well.

All of that being said, I can certainly take a number of lessons from John Green and the two of his cadre of fabulously successful books that I have now completed. I just don't plan to read any more of them.