In a valiant attempt to focus on nano this year, I decided to chronicle my journey creating a humorous short story as a series of blog posts I could schedule over November.
At this point I have an idea, a character, an archetype, at least thought about the ending twist, and reviewed some other humor approaches.
I had a week to get a first draft. I am still nowhere, just lots of ideas percolating like a nebulous cloud hovering around me.
I took a class in how to be funny hoping it would help me. One of the techniques was a journalistic approach. To get your creative juices flowing you pick a topic. In my case I am going to go with skeleton and create a table.
The first column looks like this:
- Things I think about when I think of …
- Things I don’t think about when I think of …
The first row across the top looks lik this:
Who | What | When | Where | Why/How |
Here’s how I filled it out.
skeletons | Who | What | When | Where | Why/How |
Things I think about when I think of skeletons | Ghosts
Goblins Witches Priests Druids |
Bones
Hats X-ray Shovel |
Halloween
At night Ancient |
Hell
Graves D&D Catacombs |
Necromancer
Nature Bacteria |
Things I don’t think about when I think of skeletons | Babies
Ice cream sellers Farmers Grocery clerk |
Beach balls
Celery Umbrellas |
Christmas
Easter Morning |
Beach
School Parade Soccer |
Born,
Making spaghetti |
Now the fun part is putting them together about my celery eating skeleton.
What do you do in an effort to be funny?
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