This week my workshop piece received its treatment at the hands of tutor and my fellow students. The story survived the ordeal pretty well, considering the subject matter included a baked bin tin the size of a house, a sea of gravy, and a soldier in the First World War. Besides, no work emerges from such scrutiny unscathed – that’s the point after all.
Despite a broadly positive response, the story nonplussed over half the readers, which means I need a whole lot more exposition in there. I had been sneaking my world building in dribs and drabs, in the hope it would go down nice and easy. I think habituated SF readers are attuned to that approach, and a couple of genre writers in the critique group seemed ready to give me a pass for early confusion. But this is a crossover story, aimed at a crossover readership, and I clearly need to do more work to stop many readers from giving up early on with their disbelief thoroughly unsuspended.
My tutor focused more on the voice of my narrator. As you might expect from some of the slightly surreal props, this is a darkly comic story and I had some fun with the narrator’s voice. I gave him a sardonic tone, and left no gag opportunity unmet. But the situation is larger than life to start with, and the wisecracks detracted from the humor. Reading my tutor’s notes I was reminded of this snippet by Alison Flood from a recent interview with Terry Pratchett (may musical ferrets hum him to sleep, and killer bees smite his enemies) in the Guardian.
The earlier Discworld novels are all about the jokes; as Pratchett has matured as a writer, they have become less jokey and more funny. “The further back you go the more juvenile they appear,” he says. “There’s funny and joking, the two are different … As things progressed, both with adult and junior books, I found that in subtle kinds of ways, without being preachy at all, you could suggest rather interesting things.” Neil Gaiman, with whom he wrote Good Omens (1991), agrees: “He’s got better and better over the years – he now follows the story, not the jokes, while I think the early books followed the jokes..”
So my lesson this week? If you’re telling a satirical story, let the story do the work. Too ironic a narrator can distance readers from your world, and make it less real to them. This is a particular problem if your world is already just a little ludicrous. Make your narrator and your characters believe absolutely in the world, and make the stakes very real to them. The best comedy is deadpan.
