Comedy
My hero Gilbert has just fallen into a well.
There were two ways of doing this, and like a patient, professional actor he tried both for me. Take One: we lowered him into the well on a rope held by three of his men, with whom he had an argument about whether they could have a horse to help them pull him up again. Then he looked for treasure in the wall of the well, gyrating slowly on the end of his rope while continuing to argue with the men above him, and so on for a thousand words or more before finally the inevitable happened and he got his soaking.
Take Two: I dropped him in with the first sentence of the chapter. In you go, Gilbert - Splosh!
There is no doubt in my mind which is better way. To prove the point I have done it to him again, in the first sentence of this post. And I’ve saved a thousand words to boot.
The late Jan Mark, a writer whom I was just getting to know when she died, would say that comedy was the only emotion that you could not fake on the page. The hottest love scenes can be written with a cold heart (and many are.) The most poignant tragedy can be written with a cynical smile on the lips. But you can’t fake laughter. You have to be laughing yourself when you write, she said, or it doesn’t work. She was right.
On the face of it, Take One should have been better. There were many things there that ought to have been funny. But there’s a world of difference between something that Ought to Be Funny and something that Is - just listen to any comedian on an off day. The tense build-up isn’t actually tense. The release isn’t a release. The well-turned phrase that the reader wants to rush off and read aloud to a friend - it doesn’t come. And you can’t make it come. And you’re left looking at what you’ve made and thinking ‘Why doesn’t it work?’ Like a failed Noah looking at his ark and saying ‘Well I made it 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide etc. Why doesn’t it float?’ Answer: because you made it of concrete.
Only the laugh within you will make it live. What makes me laugh? In you go, Gilbert - Splosh! There, I did it again.
Sorry, Gilbert.