Funny Business

I've always been interested in hearing about about the origin of a short story--the idea that first puts a particular story into a writer's head. As for my own stories, I can remember how all of them started out. Some of those ideas, though I can't say they're all interesting, came from real-life situations and others were picked out of the ether. A few starting points that I remember well are (1) a gag several of us played on campus cops when I was in college, (2) a time-travel mistake that lands a London-bound scientist on a Pearl Harbor battleship, (3) an Old West sheriff joining forces with his prisoner to fend off an Indian attack, (4) a pair of idiot bank robbers carjacking a self-driving vehicle, (4) my seeing an airline passenger rescue a stranger in the adjoining seat after the guy ordered a drink and realized he was short on cash, etc., etc., etc. Sometimes the ideas seem to come from nowhere.

Having said that . . . I found myself in need of such an idea when I decided to write a story for the recent anthology Gag Me with a Spoon: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of the '80s (White City Press). Some of the most appealing things about this anthology, for me, were its editor--Jay Hartman--and the suggestion that it be a humorous crime story, the funnier the better. Humorous stories are always, always the most fun to write.

For this one, I started out by thinking of a plot--some writers start with characters, some with theme, some with settings; I usually start with plots--and since I was in sort of a private-eye state of mind after writing a couple of PI stories for magazines, I pictured a story that featured a PI but was seen through someone else's POV. I wanted the private investigator to be a main character but not the story's protagonist. (As you'll see if you wind up reading it, the story goes on awhile after the PI exits the narrative.) In fact, my protagonist is the client--the guy who hires the PI. As I mulled all of that over (my mulling sometimes takes a few days), I happened to recall one of the funniest jokes I'd ever heard. It was told at an IBM conference many years ago, back when I was earning an honest living, and includes a phone call and a misunderstanding that I shouldn't reveal, spoilerwise. (You might even remember the joke--I've since heard it elsewhere.) 

While all this was bouncing around in my head, I was also trying to think of a song from the 1980s that I especially enjoyed, and made sure it was one with a title that I could incorporate into my story and that could also be used as the title of my story. After some googling and a lot of remembering, I came up with "Uptown Girl," by Billy Joel. I asked the editor if I could lay claim to that song, and he agreed. NOTE: This isn't the way I usually start writing a story for a music-themed anthology. I usually pick out the song first, before I do anything else. But not this time. 

Anyhow, building my story around that song was pretty easy, since I already had a basic plot in my head. Also keeping the skeleton of that old joke in mind, I fiddled around with the setting and the characters and their occupations and their situations, plugged a very uptown lady into the mix, added some other characters as well, and finished it off by inserting a few Easter eggs that would, I hoped, remind the reader of the song at several points in the course of the story.

Again, one of the main attractions of writing this story, to me, was the humor, and the need for some funny dialogue. Trying to take a stupid and embarrassing and dangerous situation and make it desperately important to the characters was fun in itself, and I had a great time with it. I've often heard that writers know a horror story works when it scares them during the writing--and I think the same thing is true of humor. If I find myself laughing out loud during the writing or rewriting, I'm fairly sure that at least a few readers might laugh also.

Whether my story turns out funny to you or not, whether it works for you or not, I do hope you'll find and read the book. Jay doesn't publish any bad anthologies. Personally, I can't wait to dig into all my fellow writers' stories. If they had as good a time as I did, I think I'll enjoy the book.

Questions: I know some of you write humor, and do it well. Have any of you not yet tried writing a funny story? How about a funny crime story? Do you, like me, sometimes find that funny stories are easier to write? (Don't get me wrong, I write a lot of stories that have no humor in them at all--think Donald Westlake's Parker novels, if I can be so bold as to compare my scribbling to the Master. Those Parker books of his were so different from his usual novels that he used a pseudonym for them. Which was probably a good idea--I still have trouble believing that the mischievous Westlake was also Richard Stark.) And getting away from the writer side of all this, do you like reading humorous stories (or novels)? How about humorous mysteries? Any in particular? Novelwise, my faves might be Janet Evanovich's One for the Money, Westlake's Dancing Aztecs, Elmore Leonard's Maximum Bob, Carl Hiaasen's Fever Beach, and--for a different kind of humor--any of Nelson DeMille's John Corey novels. And how about coming up with your story ideas? Any secrets or hints, there? If you're writing a humorous mystery, how do you create a plot that's both mysterious and funny?

 

Strangely enough, I think the expression "Gag me with a spoon" started out as one of annoyance and disgust (remember "Valley Girls"?). With this book, that doesn't apply. I think you'll be laughing, and humming, right along with writers.