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Kate Flournoy posted an update 8 years, 7 months ago
@daniel-leinad-thompson (by the way, I have a hard time believing that is really your middle name 😛 ) I seem to remember you saying somewhere that you were working on a dystopian COMEDY. You remarked in the podcast today that dystopian fiction is usually pretty dark, so I was wondering. Was the idea for a dystopian COMEDY just a ‘because you said it can’t be done’ project for you? A breaking of the mold just to see if you could do it? How are you going about taking a very dark and depressing genre and making it a comedy?
Yeah, that’s totes a thing. A lot of my project conceptualizations start with the phrase “it can’t be done”, oftentimes coming from my own mouth, before my overarching (and highly optimistic) ideology of NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE kicks in. This idea though, while it had traces of that, was more of a, “Hey, this hasn’t been done yet, let’s go for it,” thing. Dystopia, like any popular genre I guess, has lots and lots of cliches and stupidities woven into it’s fabric, and the genre itself is wide open to creative possibilities. So YES, I’m going comedy with it. I wrote up some test scenes and got them into a critique group, kinda as a proof of concept, and the feedback I got assured me this is a concept worth developing.
Wow. That’s great. If anyone can take something totally depressing and make it comic, it will be you. 😛
What kind of comedy are you going for? Slapstick? Snarky, sarcastic humor? Irony? Or wit? The only kind of humor I seem to be able to handle well is a mix of the snarky, sarcastic humor and the wit. For some reason I just can’t do slapstick without feeling like a total buffoon, and when I feel like a buffoon, I feel like my writing is totally stupid, and when I feel like my writing is totally stupid, I tend to hate it, and when I tend to hate my writing, bad things involving fire and laptops and highlighting and the backspace button usually result.
My current style is very . . . British? It combines a very specific type of narrative tone with completely ridiculous things happening, but very specific character development that births the type of everyday comedy people have in conversations, which keeps the story grounded. At least, that’s what I think I’m doing. I’m no pro, I’m just kinda mimicking styles I like with character development I think feels real.
Don’t let bad things involving fire and laptops and highlighting and the backspace button result. Switch to DirectTV.
Riiiiiiiight. Gotcha. >D Hey, I thought the punchline was ‘Get rid of cable’!
I think I know what you mean about a ‘British’ style. Did you mean the kind of dry, matter-of-fact style that takes everything in stride no matter how wacky it is?
And then of course the dialogue. I’ll have to say most of the humor I write is in the dialogue. All my stories have at least one really sarcastic or witty character for comic relief, and I really enjoy writing those characters. Every story needs just a touch of humor.
And I know what you mean about mimicking styles you like! I do that too, though I think I have a more definite style of my own than I have of anyone else’s. My style is probably an incongruous mix of Tolkien and… um… Tolkien. Except not quite so old as that, and not quite so high and nobly beautiful. 😛
And I do find myself changing styles based on the genre I’m writing. Fantasy gets the most polished facets, and after that it’s pretty much slightly different for every other genre.