Finding the Humor: Jokes in the Midst of Tragedy

One of the worst things to believe about writing tragedies is that every scene must be tragic. Filling a serious book with heavy scenes and bleak dialogue will not get you very far. You want to be taken seriously as a writer of Important Things, and so you take yourself and your story seriously, too.

This can be a huge detriment to the quality of your story. When you're working with heavy themes, the most important thing to remember is that to your characters, there is no overarching theme. There are the present circumstances and what they're doing about them, nothing else.

The point is this: sometimes you need humor where humor doesn't seem to belong. You need it in stories about fighting other children to the death on national television. You need it in stories about cancer. And most likely, you need it in your own story, too.

Most people, and therefore most characters, have a go-to type of humor, be it so-unfunny-they're-funny (a la Ross Geller), sarcastic, hyperbolic, or a number of other things. Tragedy, especially tragedy that hasn't happened yet, doesn't change that.

If you have a character who seeks refuge through humor, it doesn't matter whether he's about to lose his eyesight to cancer and the girlfriend he loves just broke up with him and all his other friends are terminal, too. He's going to continue to seek refuge through humor.

Even if your story ends in a way that makes Romeo and Juliet seem happy, just because your book is sad, doesn't mean it has to read like it's sad. Your characters don't know the fate that awaits them. Give them some hope. Let them make inopportune jokes and feel terrible about it afterwards. Let them have a moment of refuge in the midst of their lives falling apart when they have semi-normal banter with a stranger on a bus.

Trust me, your readers will want a break from the heart-wrenching, anyway. There's nothing like the cognitive dissonance of wiping sad tears from your eyes while laughing at something funny that someone just said. You feel terrible for laughing when the situation is so bleak, and yet you can't help it; it's funny. That sort of cognitive dissonance permeates real life, and it will bring that realism into the world of your story.

Should You Use Real Life Tragedies in Your Writing?

by Rosie Genova

I didn’t grow up at the Jersey shore, but I’ve had a one-sided love affair with it my whole life, and it seemed natural to set my books there. While the seaside town in my mystery series is fictional, there are references to real places like Ocean Grove and the Seaside boardwalk to help ground the books in reality. But as I built my fictional world, I didn’t take into account another reality of shore life—hurricanes.

In October 2012, I was wrapping up the manuscript for the first book in the series, Murder and Marinara, just as Hurricane Sandy was making its way up the eastern seaboard. I hit send on October 29, only hours before I lost power for eight days. As the weather worsened, I was feeling that uneasy excitement that comes with a threatening storm. And I couldn’t help but think about how I might work a hurricane into my books. It was a perfect plot device, and my writer’s imagination teemed with fictional scenarios that involved a hurricane.

But once the wind died down,  the reality of Sandy struck with as much devastation as the storm itself. The loss of life and destruction of property in my home state were beyond expectation, and the shore communities were especially hard hit. Thousands were left homeless, businesses were destroyed, and numberless icons of the Jersey shore boardwalks and beaches were lost forever. What happened to my beloved coastline wasn’t the stuff of fiction; it was all too real.

The Seaside Heights boardwalk, its pier ripped away by Hurricane Sandy.
The wreckage of the roller coaster remained in the ocean for months.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

During revisions on the book, I talked with my editor about whether I should include the storm. In some ways, it seemed disingenuous not to mention such an all-encompassing event. In the end, however, we decided to leave it out. Cozy mysteries are meant to provide escape, and give readers a sense of comfort and closure when the culprit is caught and the cozy world is restored. This culprit—a  superstorm of historic proportions—had wreaked a kind of havoc that can’t be resolved in 80,000 words.

So when it came time for the cover conference, I suggested an image that specifically evoked those comforting, pre-storm memories of the Jersey shore.  The icon of the Ferris wheel reminded me of days on the boardwalk, of salt water taffy and games of chance, of long ago summers that felt never-ending. And it’s the one image on my cover that everyone remarks upon.

Ferris wheel detail from cover of 
Murder and Marinara

But these days, that Ferris wheel brings to mind another image—the now iconic picture of Seaside Height’s bent and twisted roller coaster, claimed by the ocean during the storm.

At this year’s Malice Domestic conference, I was lucky enough to meet Louise Penny, the Canadian author of the Inspector Gamache series. After exchanging cards, she praised my book’s cover art; in the next breath, she asked if I had addressed the hurricane in my story. Could anyone look at that Ferris wheel, she asked, and not think about the image of the wrecked roller coaster?

That question had me second guessing my original decision. My book’s release date also happens to be close to the one year anniversary of the storm, another reason I didn’t want to thread it into the fabric of the story.  I couldn’t appropriate as a plot device an event that had devastated so many lives. But now I realized I couldn’t ignore it, either.

And then Louise offered a suggestion that turned out to be the perfect solution:  an author’s note. At the end of my story, after the murderer is apprehended and all is well for my characters, I offer a short, simple explanation of why there is no mention of the storm.  In another book perhaps, a hurricane might figure into the story, but I remain conflicted about the intrusion of such a harsh reality into my fiction.

The 2013 Jersey shore season is already underway here. A number of our boardwalks have been repaired, and shore communities are busy with the rebuilding of homes and businesses. The wreckage of the roller coaster is gone, and a series of television commercials proclaims, “We’re stronger than the storm.”  And while that may be true, many of us in New Jersey still mourn for those pre-hurricane days, to a time when the icons of our beach towns stood for magical innocence and not senseless destruction.

Those are the times I try to evoke in my books. In my stories, none of the beach has been washed away. The boardwalk businesses are thriving, and everybody in town has a home. And that old roller coaster is still on its track, speeding through the night to the sound of the waves.

There is still much work to be done in Jersey shore communities. Please visit Restore the Shore to see how you might help.

A Jersey girl born and bred, Rosie Genova left her heart at the shore, which serves as the setting for much of her work. Her new series, the Italian Kitchen Mysteries, is informed by her deep appreciation for good food, her pride in her heritage, and her love of classic mysteries, from Nancy Drew to Miss Marple. Her debut novel, Murder and Marinara, will be released October 1. An English teacher by day and novelist by night, Rosie also writes women’s fiction as Rosemary DiBattista. She lives fifty miles from the nearest ocean  in central New Jersey, with her husband, two of her three sons, and an ill-behaved fox terrier.

Writing Your Tragedy

Over the years I've ended up mentoring in several capacities, and not just burgeoning writers. For years after my newborn daughter died, I moderated an infant loss support group -- and on that group, I met another writer who had lost a baby.

She was disturbed to find she couldn't write anything in the wake of her loss. I assured her it had taken four years after Emily's death to really feel like I could be a writer again. I was writing during that time, of course, but grieving robbed my brain of its inspiration.

Tragedy comes to all of us at some point in time, so be aware that it might impact your writing. There are two issues at play during and after a tragedy. The first is sheer overwhelmedness.

Let's play a game of pretend. Pretend Superman exists. He's out minding his own business when a school bus full of kids topples off a bridge, and he catches it. No problem. Then a Buick falls off the bridge, and he catches that too. He starts carrying them to safety when Spiderman swings by and says, "Hey, man, can you hold my sandwich?"

He can't do it. Not because he can't hold a sandwich (and not because one is Marvel and one is DC) but because he's run out of hands. This is what living every day is like when you're grieving. You've got both hands full of the weightiest object you've ever carried, and then you're supposed to write a novel on top of that? When you can barely write a grocery list?

The second is the issue of processing enough to write, and that's where this writer was stuck. I told her:

You can "scab over" the hurt, but it's still there, and the trauma hasn't been resolved enough that your inner self -- the introspective part that writes -- wants to handle it. You may at some level understand that it hasn't been resolved and that's what's keeping you from writing about it. Because it hasn't been resolved, you can't create a tidy little package about it.

Have you read The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner? In it she states that writers tend to keep a distance between themselves and the rest of their lives, as if they're observing their own lives. It means there's always a shell between a writer and his own feelings so that he can analyze himself even as he's experiencing something. 

Rather than just feeling hurt, a writer notes that he's feeling hurt and also how that affects him and what his hurt does to the people around him, and so on and so forth. Sometimes I wonder if that's not how I survived losing Emily at all -- by simultaneously living it and keeping some distance on myself. Maybe you've got that wall there too, and your unconscious knows it would hurt to have it come down enough to write about it.

From the perspective of time, I can see where I've coped with other difficult situations by doing the same. In fact, sometimes I find myself in the middle of a mess nowadays thinking, "I should blog about that."

But is that healthy? It is, and it's not. It's an examined life, but is it a life examined at the expense of living it? Are writers here-but-not-here when we dwell in the twilight between feeling and introspection? Are we effectively saying to ourselves, "That's nice, dear, but what have you learned?"

After a tragedy, I would categorize four stages of writeability. The writer:

1. is able to record the details of the event; emotion may or may not be present
2. writes for catharsis; an emotion-dump, primarily for himself or herself, and the details may or may not be present
3. writes evangelistically because there's a Message. eg, "These were the stupid things people said when Emily died, so you the reader should not say them" (note this is outwardly directed, but because it's angry writing, it's still primarily for oneself)
4. writes and lets the story tell itself without pushing a message

By Stage 4, the tragedy stops being an Issue and the writer stops having a Message. In Stage 2, I don't believe the writer has a Message yet, but s/he's coming toward one. Stage 3 is often unreadable because the Message (and many times an angry Message) dominates the writing. The writer is into consciousness-raising and the story takes a back seat to the Message. Unfortunately this phase is where the writer feels fired up and finally ready to write again, and therefore you get most of the writing about Issues, and hence why most issue-exploring writing has a Message.

My daughter Emily died during July, 2000 and I had her website up by September, but writing something deeper and more reflective took time. I don't think I fully explored in fiction the emotions of losing a baby until I wrote Winter Branches (in 2006) and even there, the feelings were translated away from a mother-baby couple. (I had written about an infant's death six months earlier in Damage, but while Damage centered on the same situation, the main character did no grieving. It's the frame of the house without the furnishings, the carpet, or the drapes.)

My point here is this: writers process tragedy using many of the same parts of the brain that create fiction. Writing in an effort to process the emotions is journaling, and that's fine. But writing your tragedy in an attempt to leap right to the end product -- that only leads to stalled-out writing and a burnt-out writer, or else it leads to a fake-sounding resolution. 

 If you want the processed, final product, those precious resolved feelings, you need to resolve them  first.  We write after a tragedy for many reasons, but there's a difference between writing to help yourself and writing to help others. Writing to help others in the same situation requires your feelings to have matured, so take a deep breath. As they say on an airplane, put on your own oxygen mask first. 

If you've endured a tragedy, give it time before you try writing professionally about it on the level you know you can.

---
Jane Lebak is the author of The Wrong Enemy. She has four kids, three cats, two books in print, and one husband. She lives in the Swamp and spends her time either writing books or ejecting stink bugs from the house. At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four kids. If you want to make her rich and famous, please contact the riveting Roseanne Wells of the Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency.