Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Practicing Funny

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This is the week of the humor writing class in Ariel Gore's Literary Kitchen.

It's kind of kicking my ass.

It's not that I didn't know that writing humor is hard; I already knew that. But trying to write to the prompts and make them funny is hard because some of the subject matter for applying humor is not naturally funny.

No, that's not explaining it well.

Okay. An example. On Tuesday we were to make two lists of things which we aren't supposed to write about or talk about for reasons which put them into those two lists. The things fell into the sacred-don't-touch column or the taboo-you're-going-to-hell column. Then we had to write.

It took me about forty-five minutes just to come up with five things in each column. And I wasn't even to the writing stage, yet.

I got there. I wrote. I wrote some funny stuff. And some not as funny stuff. It was a freewrite so it meandered a bit. Which was okay,too.

I am writing every day. And I am giving some feedback every day.

Sometimes I am surprised at what comes off my hands onto the page and it's not bad. Maybe I do still have a funny streak left. The next step will be figuring out how to integrate it into more of my writing.
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