Writing Humor with a Partner

Maggie: Humor is a tricky thing. What someone finds funny another will find absurd.

Julie: Pizza, pizza, oh my. Pizza train, pizza train. Everybody pizza train. WHOO WHOO

Maggie: …

Homely unicorn is also not amused.

Julie: Actually, that’s kind of how collaborative writing goes sometimes. One of us will say something we think is BRILLIANT (such as typing out my best recollection of Jimmy Fallon’s Pizza Party dance). The other says, “Um, no.” That second set of eyes is usually right, by the way...whether you’re talking humor or a serious plotline.

Maggie: I feel that my sense of humor is radically different from Julie’s. But we don’t let it work against us but rather for us. We tweak the moments until both of us find humor in the situation. So hopefully if both of us find it funny, the majority of readers will chuckle at it too.

Julie: Our book is above all a romance, but we like to put in moments to make the readers smile. Isn’t that the point of writing?

Maggie: I just share my writing, my imagination with others and hopefully they’ll be entertained too.

I’d also say that when looking for someone to write with or someone to edit/beta read your work, that it’s a good idea to find someone who thinks differently from you. We had a wonderful beta reader who wasn’t even in our target audience. She didn’t like romances but she had no trouble reading The Healer and the Pirate. When it appealed to a non-romance reader we knew that we had something special.

Julie: Check back next week for one more note on collaborative writing. What are we talking about? It’s a bit of a mystery.

(And yes, Julie made the homely unicorn. :) )