FUN IS GOOD, PART III: WIT

In this, our third installment of what gives a book the elusive element of fun, I'm going to talk about something that may seem obvious, but which is hard to quantify: wit.

In these times where far too many people  treat ignorance as something of which to be proud, the word "wit" seems at times to have fallen into disrepute. It carries with it a vague aroma of snootiness, of elitism, of cruel jibes delivered over dry martinis by callous sophisticates.

But wit--which I define as intelligent, incisive language that also manages to be amusing--is one of the things that can make a book fun to read. As just one example, take the works of Laura Lippman. Laura writes two kinds of books: her standalones, like her most recent book I'D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE, are engrossing, heart-stoppingly suspenseful, and gorgeously written; her Tess Monaghan series, about a female PI in Baltimore, are all of those things, and they're also huge fun to read. The difference is wit. When Laura writes of a character, as she did in her book IN A STRANGE CITY:

Tess Monaghan couldn't help thinking of her prospective client as the Porcine One. He had a round belly and that over-all pink look, heightened by a rash-like red on his cheeks, a souvenir of the cold day. His legs were so short that Tess felt ungracious for not owning a footstool, which would have kept them from swinging, childlike, above the floor. The legs ended in tiny feet encased in what must be the world's smallest--and shiniest--black wingtips. These had clicked across her wooden floor like little hooves.

you can't help but see him, and you can't help but smile at the image, if you don't actually laugh out loud. The wit comes from the delicious, wicked sharpness of the picture. 

Sometimes wit comes out of a deadpan description of the mundane that ignores the big, dark, sometimes even scary thing that's really going on. The humor comes from  the dichotomy created by the characters' apparent obliviousness or nonchalance about the rabid elephant in the room. Examples are the opening conversation in RESERVOIR DOGS, or this exchange from Donald E. Westlake's BANK SHOT:

Kelp drove one-handed for a minute while he got out his pack of Trues, shook one out, and put it between his lips. He extended the pack sideways, saying, "Cigarette?"
"True? What the hell kind of brand is that?"
"It's one of the new ones with the low nicotine and tars. Try it."
"I'll stick to Camels," Dortmunder said, and out of the corner of his eye Kelp saw him pull a battered pack of them from his jacket pocket. "True," Dortmunder grumbled. "I don't know what the hell kind of name that is for a cigarette."
Kelp was stung. He said, "Well, what kind of name is Camel? True means something. What the hell does Camel mean?"
"It means cigarettes," Dortmunder said. "For years and years it means cigarettes. I see something called True, I figure right away it's a fake."
"Just because you've been working a con," Kelp said, "you figure everybody else is too."
"That's right," Dortmunder said.
Kelp could deal with anything at that point except being agreed with; not knowing where to go from there, he let the conversation lapse.

 Often, wit takes the form of an impossibly perfect and well-composed comeback, the sort of riposte that you realize no human being could ever come up with on the spur of the moment, but which you wish you could. Like this exchange from Chandler's THE BIG SLEEP:

      I grinned at her with my head on one side. She flushed. Her hot black eyes looked mad. "I don't see what there is to be cagey about," she snapped. "And I don't like your manners."

  "I'm not crazy about yours," I said. I didn't ask to see you. You sent for me. I don't mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don't waste your time trying to cross-examine me."

 It's sort of like one of those Eric Clapton guitar solos where he tears off on a phrase so long and harmonically  complex  that you can't imagine a human mind creating it, much less doing so on the fly.

 Other times, wit isn't so elaborate, but instead lightning quick, like the jab that you don't see till your opponent's pulling it back and you're wondering where that ringing sound is coming from.  Ken Bruen is a master at this sort of thing,  as in this quick yet perfect  description of a cop at a traffic stop:

He wasn't wearing shades, but he wanted to...and badly.

Note that you're unilikely to find the works I've quoted above are to be found in your bookstore's humor section. some of them, like Our Ken's work, are downright dark. All of them have humor, however. Smart, witty humor, and that's one of the things that makes them fun.

Tell us, O 'Rati: Who are your favorite witty, fun writers?

Fun Is Good, Part II: The Audacity Factor (or Oh, No, He Did NOT Just Do That!)

 by J.D. Rhoades

L'audace, l'audace, encore l'audace, et toujours l'audace!

-George S. Patton, supposedly quoting Frederick the Great

This is the second in my series of posts on what gives books that  all-important yet elusive element of fun. As we remember from my last post on  the Bad-ass Factor, any  moment that makes you want to leap up, pump your fist in the air and holler ‘Hell YEAH!” increases the fun factor exponentially. But  so can moments that make you say to yourself  “Oh, no. She’s not really going to do that”,  or moments in which the reader goes,  “No WAY is he going to pull this off.”  Sometimes the Audacity Factor--the sheer outrageousness of the topic or of the way it’s carried out--can add fun to a book.

Take for example, one I’m reading right now, EMPIRE OF IVORY by Naomi Novik. It’s one of her Temeraire series of fantasy novels. They’re basically Patrick O’Brian-esque Napoleonic Era naval adventures--but with flying, talking dragons taking on the French hordes instead of sailing ships. If that made you involuntarily laugh out loud in disbelief at the imaginativeness  of the concept, you’re not the only one.  

Another example is Victor Gischler’s GO-GO GIRLS OF THE APOCALYPSE. Hell, the title alone makes you think “we are in for one wild ride.”  And you’re right. How can you not love a book in which a post-apocalyptic American civilization rises from the ashes, based around a chain of strip clubs owned by a guy named Joey Armageddon? After all, once  the inevitable destruction of society and the following Dark Age is over, a fellow could really use a cold beer and a lap dance.

On a more literary note, Michael Chabon’s THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN’S UNION sets us down in an alternate world where the post-Holocaust Jewish state was established,  not in the Middle East, but in the Sitka peninsula of Alaska. Say what?

In Neal Stephenson’s SNOW CRASH, not only is the hero/protagonist named Hiro Protagonist, he starts the book as a pizza delivery guy--for the Mafia:

If the thirty-minute deadline expires, news of the disaster is flashed to CosaNostra Pizza Headquarters and relayed from there to Uncle Enzo himself–the Sicilian Colonel Sanders, the Andy Griffith of Bensonhurst, the straight razor-swinging figment of many a Deliverator’s nightmares, the Capo and prime figurehead of CosaNostra Pizza, Incorporated–who will be on the phone to the customer within five minutes, apologizing profusely. The next day, Uncle Enzo will land on the customer’s yard in a jet helicopter and apologize some more and give him a free trip to Italy–all he has to do is sign a bunch of releases that make him a public figure and spokesperson for CosaNostra Pizza and basically end his private life as he knows it. He will come away from the whole thing feeling that, somehow, he owes the Mafia a favor.

The Deliverator does not know for sure what happens to the driver in such cases, but he has heard some rumors.

After that, things start to get weird.

There’s a lot of overlap, you’ll note, between this factor and the idea of High Concept that Our Alex talks about here.  Outrageous High Concept can often equal serious fun.

All of the above books are gripping, page-turning, and thought provoking. They're also a hell of a lot of fun to read. Why?

One thing that makes audacious concepts  fun is the same thing that makes watching an acrobat or a high wire artist fun: you wonder if they’re going to pull it off or if they’re going to crash to the floor before your very eyes.

So how do you pull it off? Well, there are a few things you need to do: 

First, be matter-of-fact. Your readers may find the world you build outrageous or strange, but to your characters,  it's their everyday life (unless you're doing a Wizard of Oz type tale, where your protagonist is dropped into another world). They're not going to spend a lot of time examining or thinking about their surroundings, so neither should you by lapsing into long passages of description or having them think about "how wonderful it is that we have flying dragons."

Which leads to our second point: move fast. Get right into the story, and don't give the reader a lot of time tho think "Flying Dragons? How the hell does THAT work?"

This leads to something akin to the high wire act mentioned above: you've got to be able to put in enough backstory to let the reader know what's going on, without stopping the narrative dead in its tracks with the dreaded "As you know..." Chabon, for example,  doesn't have a character say, "As you know, Meyer, the State of Israel was founded in 1948, but was destroyed after only three months, so we ended up here..." He gets to the story, and you have to figure out what's going on. In some unimportant respects, you never do; in THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN'S UNION, casual mentions of things like "the Cuban War" and "The Third Russian Republic" are never explained; they'e part of the background noise every real society has.

But most importantly, you have to have a story to tell. YIDDISH POLICEMAN'S UNION is more than just an audacious concept, it's an engrossing neo-noir  murder mystery. GO-GO GIRLS OF THE APOCALYPSE is more than just laugh-out-loud outrageous, it's a cracking good adventure tale. In order for a story to be outrageous and fun, it has to first be a story. If you don't have that, you have something like John Boorman's movie ZARDOZ, which has outragous concept to spare, as well as Sean Connery running around in a red leather jockstrap and a ponytail talking to a flying stone head, but it ends up being nearly incomprehensible, unless you're really really stoned.

Don't let this happen to you....

So tell us, readers and writers...what are some of your favorite fun, audacious concepts? Which ones does the author manage to pull off, and if you dare, which ones veer into ZARDOZ territory?

Fun Is Good, Part I: The Badass Factor

by J.D. Rhoades

Did you ever fly a kite in bed?
Did you ever walk with ten cats on your head?

If you never did, you should.
These things are fun, and fun is good.

           -Dr. Seuss

There are a lot of things that go into making a great book: plot, pacing, characterization, dialogue, etc. Today, I’d like to talk about another, often-overlooked factor: fun.

Not a lot of people talk about what makes a book fun to read. That’s probably because it’s such a hard thing to quantify. But if a book is fun to read, people will keep coming back to it, and they’ll anxiously await the next one.

For purposes of these posts, I’m not just talking about books being funny. Certainly a book that makes you laugh is fun. But there are some “serious” works that are just a sheer hoot to read and/or watch. In my next few posts, I’ll be talking about some of the things that make a book or movie fun (to me at least).

First,  we’ll talk about one of my favorites:  the badass factor.

From Beowulf to Jack Reacher, we do love our badasses, those unstoppable, unkillable guys and gals who take a licking and keep on kicking,  right up till the end when l they either triumph, or in the case of badass villains, go down with their guns (and sometimes themselves) blazing.

One of the things,  for example, that makes Jonathan Maberry’s zombie-driven thriller  PATIENT ZERO so much fun is that its main character, Joe Ledger,  is a serious badass, and he knows it. It’s right there in the book’s dynamite first line: “When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week, there’s either something wrong with your skills or something wrong with your world. And there’s nothing wrong with my skills.”

That passage illustrates one of the things that makes a bad-ass a bad-ass (and thus adds to the fun):  an  extraordinary self-assurance, born of an uber-competence in the fields of  crushing enemies, seeing them driven before them, and hearing the lamentation of their women. Robert Crais' Joe Pike, for example, adds a huge fun factor to the Elvis Cole books by simply being the absolute best at disposing of bad guys without hardly breaking a sweat or even taking off his shades. And the books featuring Pike (there's a new one out-YAY!) are, yes, serious fun.

The writer should be warned, though. There's a very fine line between the type of confidence that tickles the reader's fun center and the kind that stimulates the eye-rolling nerve.

Another form  of bad-assery is the Sheer Stubborn Endurance kind, exemplfied by Bruce Willis' John McClain in the frst DIE HARD movie. Blown up, burned, feet cut to ribbons, he just keeps coming after the bad guys. Another example: Inigo Montoya in THE PRINCESS BRIDE, who, though badly wounded, gets up, raises his sword,  and delivers his signature  line, over and over, until he finally does in the man who killed his father, after this classic exchange:

Inigo Montoya: Offer me anything I ask for.

Count Rugen: Anything you want...

Inigo Montoya (runs Rugen through): I want my father back, you son of a bitch.

Which brings us to the  Badass Moments, in which a character’s true awesomeness is exhibited, often through a single line or gesture. Example: the moment in the first episode of the TV series FIREFLY when Captain Mal Reynolds comes striding up the ship’s cargo ramp into the middle of a tense standoff,  sees one of his people being held hostage, draws,  shoots the hostage taker dead without breaking stride, and moves on to getting the ship flying.

Another type of Badass Moment comes when  someone who’d previously been the hunted  turns into the lion and starts whomping the  snot out of bad guys  right and left. Example: the moment in ALIENS when the hangar door opens to reveal Ripley, driving that giant exoskeleton and snarling “GET away from her, you BITCH!”

Rule of thumb: Any  moment that makes you want to leap up, pump your fist in the air and holler ‘Hell YEAH!” increases the fun factor exponentially.

LORD OF THE RINGS, (the book version) is  fun, in large part, because it’s  chock full o’badasses and badass moments, like:  Aragorn standing on the walls of the surrounded Helm’s Deep and telling the million or so nasties teeming about below him that no one's ever taken that fortress and  that the ridiculously outnumbered defenders will let them live if they run away now; Theodens' pre-charge speech and the  Ride of the Rohirrim, and my favorite, when Eowyn, after being warned by the Nazgul that no man can kill him, whips off her helmet and gives her “No man am I” speech (a Badass Moment if there ever was one). And let's face it, when it comes to  Sheer Stubborn Endurance badassery, the name's Gamgee. Sam Gamgee.

So tell me: who are your favorite badasses? And for future posts: what makes a book not just good, but FUN?

Next time: The Audacity Factor, or Oh, No, He Did NOT Just Do That!

A Little Holiday Cheer

It’s a week before Christmas (okay, a week and a day), but I’m already traveling around visiting friends and family. I’m happy to say the new manuscript is all but done. Just a few more days work, maybe five tops, and I’ve decided not to push it, so will finish up right after New Years.

Anyway, since I’m traveling around today (you’ll probably notice the lack of response ahead of time from me, my apologies), thought I’d leave you with some holiday cheer. Two songs and a present.

Song one features David Bowie and Bing Crosby singing together. I remember watching this when I was a kid, and it’s stuck with me every since:

Song two…couldn’t leave out the kids from Glee:

And a present:

Oh, and in case you missed it…here’s a new take on people power.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone!