Sunday, August 21, 2016

novel - How do I keep the plot interesting in a humorous book?


I am about to start writing a fantasy-comedy novel. A problem I found in 1-2 books of this genre is that the plot becomes weak, and the story starts to slow down.


The reason I believe this happens is that there is no big struggle or evil villain. Since there is no tension in the plot (as it is a comedy book), the plot soon loses focus.


The story breaks down to "Hero goes to place A, does something funny, then goes to B, does something funny" etc.


How do I avoid this problem?



Answer



This is a misconception. Interesting plots are hard to write. Some people think "Oh, I put in some funny jokes to hide that I totally suck at the real story."


Therefore you find humorous books out there, which story is boring. But that has nothing to do with the humor in the book, it has to do with lazy writers.


The way to an interesting plot is paved with conflicts. There must be (at least) one huge conflict and several minor ones along the way. And it doesn't matter if there is any humor, sex, tragedy, or Pokémon dragon slayers in that book.


No comments:

Post a Comment

technique - How credible is wikipedia?

I understand that this question relates more to wikipedia than it does writing but... If I was going to use wikipedia for a source for a res...