Keeping the muse amused

Sherry Antonetti, who writes “Chocolate for Your Brain,” sends some writing tips — “to be broken, amended, ignored or destroyed as necessary.”

10.) Keeing a notepad with you. Thoughts that are funny are more fleeting than a tweet. Edits are for later. Recall isn’t editing. It’s guessing and knowing while you’re in the ballpark, what you thought earlier was brilliant, pithy and much better than the scrap of leftover mental wit you’ve concocted now. Wish I’d written down what I thought last night.

9.) Humor is about relationship, or the lack of it. The amount of mercy you dollop in indicates whether it is scathing satire or simply a warm grin or somewhere within the standard deviation of all things humorous. Decide which flavor each piece is, dark chocolate with sea salt, creamy milk with nuts and all things inbetween. Stay consistent within each work.

8.) Never use the same word twice to describe a singular thing unless repetition is part of the setup. It leads to more descriptive and humorous phrases. For example: Congress … political opportunistic hacks … blood- and soul-sucking government bureaucrats … elected leeches with jobs …

7.) Progression and misdirection. Up or down, things should ultimately either go where you’re not expecting or build the tension in getting to where everyone expects but by a route not easily discerned. Comedy must build and then deflate, or take us beyond what is the perceived basic level. The rule of three is known, but to really work the concept, try pushing to five. The fifth has to finish it, but it allows for a roller coaster experience, with a climb up a hill, a crest, a dip and then a big ending.

6.) Read aloud. We add words in our heads when we read to make what we write make sense. Reading aloud is the fastest way to tighten a piece.

5.) Write some fresh daily. Edit yesterday’s. Reread, tweak and submit on the third day.

4.) Invert clichés. It’s a quick way to create a fresh turn of phrase.

3.) Relax and allow yourself to enjoy playing in the deeper part of your imagination pool. As serious as the business of writing is, humor requires a degree of humility and willingness to endure the Sisyphean struggle that is life with a grin.

2.) If you can’t spot the relationship between your setup and your punch line, it isn’t funny. If it requires mental gymnastics, emotional origami and superior working knowledge in an obscure field to get it, it still needs work.

1.) Humor is like a Snicker’s bar. It’s sweet. It has some nuttiness. It fills and it contains a core of truth, which the laughter makes enduring. Because no one ever wants to eat a pure dose of nougat.

—Sherry Antonetti