Thursday, April 18, 2013

P is for Pacing

This month I'm participating in the A-Z Blogging Challenge. The theme I'm going with this year is writing humor. Follow along to learn more about the different ways to make your fiction, articles or blog posts humorous. 



Pacing. This is a term we, as writers, hear about fairly often. So, what makes for good pacing in humor? How do we do it? 

As I was researching this topic, I came across an article about writing humor by Dave Barry. He had this to say about pacing. And  it pretty much sums up the way to do it.  

"You need to have a real strong sense of pacing. Too many attempts at humor fail because A, either it takes forever to get to what's supposed to be funny and just wanders around before it gets there, doesn't seem to be any purpose. Or once it gets there, it says it over and over and over, it doesn't get out of there, you know, quickly. So, I think it's a lot like stand-up comedy, in a sense, you don't let the reader see it coming, you hit the reader with it, and then you get out of there and go to something else the reader doesn't see coming. And that's probably the most fundamentally important thing." -Dave Barry

Brilliant. Get in, say what you need and then leave. Or, in other words,  set up the joke, add a few more details and then drop the punchline. 

Batta-bing. Batta-boom.

What are your thoughts on pacing? Is this something that comes natural to you? Or do you have to really work hard to pace your humor or, simply, your writing well?

4 comments:

  1. Bad pacing can kill a lot of things. Except roaches.

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  2. So glad you're doing this theme. I want to be funny and kill a lot of things, if at all possible.

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  3. Very good advice! Just dropping by from the AtoZ Challenge. I have set up a link to your blog from my post today http://wp.me/p2Eu3u-nQ

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