Don't Forget to Laugh
This is a very valuable lesson and one I tend to... well... forget. If you follow this blog you'll know that I am participating in NaNoWriMo– National Novel Writing Month, where one has to write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November. I will succeed, but after the first third it has been very difficult. Like slogging through the mud. Painful. Lots of resistance in the daily writing. What changed? It hit me yesterday.
I'm currently reading Nelson DeMille's The General's Daughter, and I am laughing my ass off– out loud. I first read DeMille this summer, The Charm School, and have never laughed so hard out loud with a fictional book. DeMille, in the two books above, he writes his main character with dry sarcastic wit and charisma. The banter he has with other characters is fantastic. DeMille is a great story teller and I couldn't recommend him more. Especially the two aforementioned books.
(For non-fiction, the most I've ever laughed out loud was Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island. Bryson, an American, recounts, with humor, his life in England, and all the differences. I, an American, was passing my first of nine years in England at the time, and could totally empathize.).
Now, my current situation. I loved my first 7-10 days of writing NaNoWriMo. I had fun. I laughed out loud. The writing flowed. The characters had great banter and action. The situations were fun. Once, their location changed (as the story goes), that was it. But not only that, they also separated, and then that was really it. The writing became too serious and all the fun, humor, witty banter, and charismatic appeal went out the window. Now, I brought it back yesterday. The writing was better– the day didn't feel like I was walking up hill in the mud. And I had fun. I laughed. I brought back the element of humor and sarcasm to the characters. They missed it. They had fun, which means I had fun.
Don't forget to laugh. No need to make life more difficult than it is. Especially, when you have a daily grind and a monumental project such as writing a book! Keep laughing and keep going.
Other novels that I've found fun or funny and highly entertaining: Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty, George V. Higgins's The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Gregory Mcdonald's Fletch, Ross Macdonald's The Moving Target (Lew Archer series), Trevanian's The Eiger Sanction (the first half, then he lost it in the second half! Lesson...) I'm going to read hi most famous book soon: Shibumi, and it should be funny, the movie based on the novel was: Bullet Train, Don Winslow's Savages, Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions.