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Read the extract below, decide what you think, then read my thoughts after ‘The Cuts’.
Untitled (by Jake)
“Get on the bloody ground, scuffers!”
Bang!
Whoops. Shot the stupid thing after I yelled. I was supposed to do it beforehand. I don’t really understand bank robbing etiquette, I guess.
“Why’d you say that with a british accent?” asked Jones, my tall and lanky companion.
“Because the cops will go looking for a british dude if the witnesses say I said ‘bloody’,” I replied, looking around to make sure everyone was on the ground.
“I can hear you speaking english, you know,” said one man on the ground.
“Yeah, your accent wasn’t really impressive either. Kinda obviously fake,” said another man.
“Aw, shut the hell up scuffers,” I replied.
“Also, what’s a scuffer? Are you just making up British slang?” pried Jones.
“I said shut the hell up! Where’s Thorne?” Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, ‘Thorne? That’s a pretty badass name.’ and while I agree I must interject that Thorne is the most nerdiest little weakling I’ve ever seen and I’m much cooler than him. That being said, it’s also important to mention he’s a crazy. Like legitimately insane. Hears voices and stuff. That’s why we gave him the painted squirt gun.
“Beats me. Let’s just get the cash,” relied Jones.
Me and Jones, sorry, Jones and I, screw you, walked over to the clerk hiding under the desk.
I rung the little bell.
“Hey, Clerky, I need some service,” I said. “Get up.”
Clerky stood up slowly with his hands up.
“Did you press the button that alerts the police?” I ask.
The Cuts
Tricky thing, humour. Get it right and you’re a hero. You actively bring delight into people’s lives. But get it wrong, and your audience don’t just experience the absence of delight – you provoke active resentment. The best you can hope for is a withering pity, directed not at the work, but at you, at your core being.
Comedy makes people judge the shit out of you.
When you’re on stage (and, having tried to be funny as part of my job for years now, I’ve experienced this first-hand) you get to watch, live, as strangers decide they don’t like you. Of course, if your jokes land, those self-same strangers often decide that you are inherently worthwhile and sometimes that they would like to have sex with you. It’s a horrible, addictive business, like inserting your penis into an aperture that has a 50% chance of being your orifice of choice on a comely example of whichever gender you find most appealing, and a 50% chance of being a cigar guillotine. It takes a truly broken and mentally subnormal human being to stitch his penis back on and try again.
On the face of it, then, prose comedy seems to offer the perfect refuge for the brittle poltroon desperate for validation but too gutless to watch his or her witticisms extinguish the audience’s will to live.
But actually, it’s much harder.
Seeing people’s eyes glaze over and their jaws set in a rictus of disapproval is a wonderful sharpener. There, right in front of you, you have a bunch of editors giving instant feedback on your work. Deliver the same line to crickets, three nights on the trot, and – unless you’re a sociopath who enjoys administering pain and a masochist who enjoys experiencing it – you’ll cut it.
Writing comic fiction is like performing a stand-up set in a locked office for 18 months straight, to no one. At the end of the 18 months you send the video of the entire performance to a friend with the addendum: ‘is this funny?’
Chances are, no. Comic fiction is crazy hard. It is a courageous path, Jake, and I salute you for taking it. Just remember there’s no shame in bundling the fuck off of it if you decide, rightly, that it’s a road for holy fools and common prannies.
“Get on the bloody ground, scuffers!”
I think I’ve said plenty in previous posts about opening with dialogue – namely that it’s fine, albeit largely content-dependent.
And the content here is… mehhh. I mean, it turns out you’re setting up a joke, but here, at the moment we encounter it, it just reads like shit writing. We don’t know that ‘scuffers’ is deliberately bad; you haven’t built up that all-important cushion of goodwill.
If you were a late-career celebrated comic novelist – and who knows, Jake, perhaps someday you will be – then this would be less of a problem. Established writers get that cushion of goodwill for free – although ‘free’ isn’t quite right. They’ve simply built up that goodwill in previous books. The same goes for established stand-ups, who can (often, admittedly not always) get away with doing riskier, more nuanced, longer-form material, because their audiences trust that they’re going somewhere with it.
For a novice author like you, Jake, the opening of your novel has to do more than simply introduce the story. It must provide evidence that you are a competent writer – a worthy steward in whom we are right to invest our time and money. That’s a big ask, and the risk of your first line is that the reader thinks: ‘No one speaks like that – this is going to be shit.’ Not a great note to start on.
The fact that we don’t know who’s speaking, to whom, and where, compounds the problem. It’s just an anonymous figure screaming bollocks in a white void. (I can relate, but still)
Bang!
Whoops. Shot the stupid thing after I yelled.
My head is in my hands and I am weeping with grief at the death of literature.
You want us to imagine the report of a pistol (I assume there’s a pistol, although the closest you come to ever mentioning weapons is the allusion to ‘a squirt gun’ later on), and the best thing you can summon up, drawing from the vast unfathomable storehouse of the human mind, bearing in mind that this is only the second sentence of your novel and you want to convince readers they should pay you for the privilege of owning a facsimile of some words you put in a particular order, to evoke a hammer falling, the ignition of the charge at the rear of the cartridge and the ejection of a bullet from the weapon’s muzzle, this ear-drum rending sound, is… ‘Bang’?
Jake. You. Can. Do. Better.
I’m not advocating you launch into a Saul Bellow-esque six page meditation on the nature of war and the absurdity of human existence as encapsulated by our fascination with the phallic yet intrinsically-female firearm (‘but no – the gun was womb, was woman, and in the warm convexities of the breech swelled a terrible fruitfulness; close-packed powders and flat-headed slugs like spurs of foetal bone, fleshy potential wrapped around a core of essential hardness, waiting to be ejected into the world, to be disgorged, exit and entrance, a raucous, infernal debut, an instant that, in sheer emotive force, would always overshadow the rest of its existence unless, by dint of trajectory and happenstance, it found its destination, the mirror-womb, the heart in loco mater in which it could bury itself and once again be home’) but please, please, please try harder than writing the word ‘bang’.
It’s not even clear that it’s a sound effect – you move immediately into first-person narration, so it reads as if the narrator shouted ‘Bang!’ for no reason.
And here’s a tip: if your narrator is having to explain what just happened because he did such a shitty job of describing it, your story’s tanking. Get it right the first time. Engage our five senses. The scene reads like we’ve been blindfolded. This isn’t a radio play. You can just go ahead and describe stuff.
I don’t really understand bank robbing etiquette, I guess.
It’s good that you include the words ‘bank robbing’ to give us the first vague hints of what sort of surroundings we ought to try to imagine. But this is more heavy-handed than a dude with a prosthetic fist made out of pure osmium.
‘Arf!’ says the narrator, digging us in the ribs, ‘you might say I’m something of an incompetent bank robber, eh readers?’
Don’t keep stepping in to underline the joke. It kills the mood.
“Why’d you say that with a british accent?” asked Jones, my tall and lanky companion.
Cap up on the b in ‘british’. I’m not convinced there’s such a thing as a ‘British accent’ – even if we flatten out regional variations by rising up the socio-economic scale, an upper-class English accent sounds very different from an upper-class Scots accent or an upper-class Welsh accent, or indeed an upper-class Northern Irish accent. Most North Americans, when they say ‘British’, mean ‘English’, and it’s unintentionally demeaning to the distinct cultural heritages that make up Britain. On the other hand, this is – presumably – an American talking, so his use of the term is in-character and fine.
No need for ‘asked’. The question mark signals that it’s a question. Just write ‘said’. I’m not convinced we need a dialogue tag at all, here. I’d much rather see Jones doing something – ‘Jones used the pistol muzzle to scratch between his angular shoulder blades’ – especially an action that suggests Jones’ personality and his appearance.
‘my tall and lanky companion’ – yes, ‘tall’ and ‘lanky’ are semantically distinct, but barely. If you described him as ‘lanky’ the reader will immediately picture a tall, thin person. ‘companion’ is a great, pernicious example of telling, not showing. Let us observe how they interact and conclude that Jones is the narrator’s companion. Even describing him as ‘lanky’ is unnecessarily static portraiture. See the previous paragraph for an economical way of implying his appearance while maintaining narrative momentum.
Remember, this is your first page. We need lean muscle.
“Because the cops will go looking for a british dude if the witnesses say I said ‘bloody’,” I replied, looking around to make sure everyone was on the ground.
Ugh. Look, the basic joke here is okay. It’s quite funny to think of this guy doing a bad impersonation to try to throw the police off the scent. But the delivery stinks.
Sentence order matters. Repeat that to yourself ten times, Jake.
The punchline here is ‘British dude’. That needs to come last. That’s the reveal. As it stands, we get the joke halfway through the sentence then keep reading as you finish up all the grammatical housekeeping. There’s lots of clumsiness here too, like ‘say I said’, but for starters you need to switch the two clauses:
‘Because if the witnesses say I said “bloody”, the cops will go looking for a British dude.’
Straightaway that’s funnier.
No need for ‘I replied’. Horrible, overdetermined verb choice (you never need to write ‘replied’ – it’s always obvious from context whether an utterance is a reply, and ‘said’ is far less obtrusive), and it’s clear who’s speaking without the dialogue tag.
“I can hear you speaking english, you know,” said one man on the ground.
Repetition of ‘on the ground’ jars.
‘one man’ is pathetically lazy. There’s nothing for us to picture. Engage your imagination. Get specific. Humour arises out of specificity. What’s funnier: an animal in some clothes or a turbot in a cagoule?
The issue isn’t that they’re ‘speaking English’, is it? The issue is that the narrator has dropped his ‘British’ accent, and is discussing how it’s fake. ‘I can hear you, you know,’ would be more natural.
“Yeah, your accent wasn’t really impressive either. Kinda obviously fake,” said another man.
‘You’re an amusingly incompetent criminal,’ said amorphous grey humanoid 2.
Don’t labour the joke. Surrounding your protagonist with interchangeable straight men who blandly state his absurdities is wearying in the extreme.
“Aw, shut the hell up scuffers,” I replied.
“Also, what’s a scuffer? Are you just making up British slang?” pried Jones.
That second ‘replied’ causes me physical pain. I am so sad that shitty, overdetermined dialogue attribution hasn’t yet been eradicated like smallpox.
And then… ack! ‘pried Jones’? If the ‘replied’ was like coming home to find your lover in bed with your grief counsellor, this is like going on to discover that, during their rambunctious fucking, they rolled over your 3DS and deleted all your Pokemon.
Fortunately, crap dialogue tags are easy to fix. Delete them. Change stupid, wank-saturated verbs to ‘said’.
Delete ‘Also’. Jones is talking, not writing an essay.
When we finally get to it, I like the joke about making up slang. A single use of ‘scuffers’ would be fine, though – it feels overplayed by this point.
“I said shut the hell up! Where’s Thorne?” Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, ‘Thorne? That’s a pretty badass name.’ and while I agree I must interject that Thorne is the most nerdiest little weakling I’ve ever seen and I’m much cooler than him.
He told the hostages to shut up, not Jones.
The whole ‘yeah, I know what you’re thinking’ aside is awful. Irritating and desperately, desperately unfunny. This doesn’t make you a bad person – it’s no reflection upon you as an artist or a human being – but the fact remains it’s shit and must be deleted.
The voice is inconsistent – it misuses words like ‘interject’ (which means ‘to butt in’ – what the narrator means is he must ‘point out’ or ‘add’, not ‘interrupt’) and ‘most nerdiest’ (just ‘nerdiest’ or ‘most nerdy’), and the register swings between pretentious malapropisms and adolescent blather (e.g. ‘I’m much cooler than him’).
The main problem is you’re laying it on too thick. The narrator is spelling out his feelings of rivalry. Better to have him unaware of them – to have the resentment masked, so we sense that he’s jealous without having him simply tell us that he’s jealous. We want to see these two characters interact and realise how the narrator is having to bite back envy. That’s much, much funnier.
Me and Jones, sorry, Jones and I, screw you, walked over to the clerk hiding under the desk.
I rung the little bell.
Who is the narrator speaking to? It’s a bit risky to be making grammar jokes when your command of the language is still a work in progress.
Don’t throw us out of the scene – the humour should be in the bank, in the moment, arising from character, not coming from the protagonist’s meta-commentary on his inadequacies as a narrator.
One person’s hilarious romp is another’s grindingly unfunny slog, but that doesn’t excuse you from the rigours of craft. Even as you recognise the subjectivity of comedy, you should labour to make your offering the best it can be. Do that, and you’ll find your audience.
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