girl_starfish made me do it!

[kaigou]

If you happen to be working on some creative writing project, fanfiction or NaNoWriMo or what have you, post exactly one sentence from each of your current work(s) in progress in your journal. It should probably be your favourite or most intriguing sentence so far, but what you choose is entirely your discretion. Mention the title (and genre) if you like, but don't mention anything else. This is merely to wet the general appetite for your forthcoming work(s).

Echoes and Postscripts:
Into the apartment building, up the elevator, down the hallway, and Relena counted her steps rather than rehearse her words one more time.

Kingfisher:
He wants to stay in this moment, where he can continue to hope that Heero will wake up, might wake up, in that precious moment, when it's still possible the spell can be broken.

Restraint of Desire:
He was tempted to count the distance between the rails, as though it would tell him how far he had to go to reach the center of the lightening strike.

Tetractys:
Trowa pursed his lips, running through the things Duo had said, the little gestures, noting the lines around Duo's eyes from years of squinting at threads and tracing patterns in the air that only Duo could see.

Comments

[kodalai.livejournal.com]

In a general sense I think you're right, but I'd posit in a slightly different way: for a certain kind of humor, you want to keep things moving as fast as possible. You can skip over all sorts of things that you'd never be allowed to skip in a serious fic; similarly, you can make any sort of illogical moves in what happens or how people react that you like.

Of course you want to keep people in-character if you can, and the events as plausible as you can, but if you're aiming for humor there's a much wider selection of what you can and can't do. 'Course, having more freedom doesn't necessarily make things easier to write -- in fact, it makes it harder, at least until you get used to it. @_@;

The corollary to "move as quickly as possible," at least how I do it, is that when you hit your punchline, you stop. In a serious fic, that would be very bad, but stopping at just the right moment leaves the audience laughing over the line/action without getting distracted by followup; especially as the reader can then imagine whatever kind of followup to the hilarious moment they like.

So... yeah. What Louise said. A lot of humor is what you don't say, rather than what you do.

[solitude1056.livejournal.com]

Yah, but a big part of humor seems also to be the requirement that you not be afraid to have your characters almost become parodies of themselves - I learned that from the fiasco known as Meeting Beatrice. I got a few comments that Trowa (among others) seemed OOC for Monster Trucks, but I guess I drew the conclusion that for it to be funny, a bit of OOC is required.

And yeah, knowing when to stop is the most important thing in comedy, at least on the stage. But it seems to be true in writing, too. Nothing worse than excessive use of exclamation points. I think it was Scott Fitzgerald who said 'using exclamation points is sort of like laughing at your own joke'.

Hrm. I think I'll stick to drama and black comedy. Easier for me, at least. ;P

[kodalai.livejournal.com]

By all means, cleave to your strengths. :) Less competition for me, at least!

[solitude1056.livejournal.com]

Someday I'll make you cry in return, though.

*shakes fist*