Monthly Archives: October 2012

5 Ways to Study Comedic Timing

22 Monday Oct 2012

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Our newest guest blogger is hard at work on several writing projects and has some insights to share on how children’s authors can create comedic characters who connect to young readers.  Enjoy!

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H.C. Ablewick is an aspiring Middle Grade Fiction author who loves large paper clips and anything made from glass.

5 Ways to Study Comedic Timing

For

Authors of Children’s Literature

By H.C. Ablewick

Some of the most successful children’s authors have won audiences with humor,  J.K. Rowling, Judy Blume, Kate DiCamillo, and Jeff Kinney, to name a few. How’d they do it? Comedic timing. It can be subtle or outrageous. It can be heart-felt or mean-spirited, depending on the characters. If you’re looking for ways to study comedic timing and what makes children laugh, here are a few suggestions.

1. Movies with Adults Acting Crazy with Animals

Think monkey scene in A Night at the Museum.  “Good Lord, Lawrence, why are you slapping a monkey?” Robin Williams (as Teddy Roosevelt) says when he sees Ben Stiller (Larry Daley) slapping a monkey.  It’s the kind of scene that makes kids laugh out loud, shout even. Why? It’s so unrealistic. The secret: children love fictional realism. They know it would be mean for a man to slap an animal but they know this scene wouldn’t happen in real life.  It’s just funny to see a grown man provoked by a monkey.

In the movie Enchanted, Timothy Spall (Nathaniel ) chases a chipmunk around a diner while James Marsden (Prince Edward), dressed in full-blown, Prince Charming attire tries to decipher the chipmunk’s squeaks. Children love this scene.  It’s about a grown man dressed up like a medieval prince in a modern diner and he’s acting like he understands a chipmunk. What isn’t funny about that?

Other notable movies with adults acting crazy with animals are Alvin and the Chipmunks (any time Dave yells at Alvin) and Mr. Hopper’s Penguins.

2. Animated Movies with Animals Falling in Love

I don’t know why children become hysterical over these scenes, but they do. I’ve witnessed it numerous times in the movie theaters. Most recently, I saw Ice Age 3.  Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel, became love-struck with a female saber-toothed squirrel. His eyes popped. She batted her heavily made-up eyes in slow motion. They played the easy-listening hit, “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine,” by the 70’s R&B singer Lou Rawls and the children in the audience roared.

The Scrat scene isn’t new. When I was young, we watched PePe Le Pew, the French skunk of the Looney Tunes cartoons. He strutted through the streets of Paris in the spring looking for love.  Like Scrat though, PePe didn’t end up with the girl. Wild chase scenes and misunderstandings followed his love scenes and added to their humor.

3. Children playing with Toys

If you watch children with their toys, you’ll pick up quite a few tricks. Anything bizarre seems to make them laugh. For example, a young relative of mine once stuck ten Lego mini-figure heads together. She and her brother laughed hysterically then  took turns creating weird combinations of mini-figures, like a surfer dude’s head on a chef’s coat with policeman’s pants all topped with a witch’s hat. It became a competition between them to see who could come up with the most outrageous mini-figure.

4. Funniest Video Shows and Wipe-Out Shows

Physical comedy is always a hit. The Funniest Video shows always have people doing stupid things and getting hurt and kids laugh. They also love dogs chasing chickens and cats hanging from ceiling fans.

In the Wipe Out shows, people bounce off giant balls, they’re knocked into pools trying to dart through moving poles, and they’re catapulted across fire and water into pools of foam. These shows have created adult playgrounds. The participants act crazy and children love to watch them throw themselves into the obstacles.

5. Long, very Long, Names

My young relatives used a DSi to record the Minister of Magic reading Dumbledore’s will in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I. I couldn’t figure out why they were recording it until they played it back. The Minister, with a very serious tone, announces, “Herein is set forth the last will and testament of Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore.” The children played it back and almost fell off the couch laughing then tried to repeat the name until they got it right.

I hope this article triggered some ideas. Good luck to you.

-H.C. Ablewick

The author can be reached at hc.ablewick@aol.com.

 

Do You See Dragons in the Clouds?

03 Wednesday Oct 2012

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The following post was kindly contributed by special guest blogger and sci-fi/fantasy author Douglas R. Brown. His works include: The Light of Epertase; Legends Reborn, and a werewolf tale with a twist, called Tamed. Doug has recently released the second book in The Light of Epertase series called A Kingdom’s Fall.

Do You See Dragons in the Clouds?

“It’s a dragon. See the tail and the puff of smoke from its mouth?”

“All I see is a bunch of clouds.”

Being a fantasy writer isn’t much different than seeing magical creatures in the clouds. Yes, I’m saying we are crazy. OK, not really. It is just that a writer needs to rediscover a way to see dragons in the clouds instead of losing that ability somewhere along the way from childhood to adulthood. Sure, there are rules to writing, time restraints, and other obstacles to becoming a writer, but at the heart of it all is finding one’s imagination again.

Let me give you an example. My full-time job is as a firefighter/paramedic on a large urban fire department. In the district where I work, there is a street named Bluefield. I’ve driven that street hundreds of times with my firefighting coworkers without a second thought. But while I was neck deep in writing my third installment in my Epertase trilogy, one day it became clear I hadn’t shut off my creative juices before going to work. We took a call to Bluefield, as we often did, and when I saw the sign, I thought “Hm. The blue fields.” As I thought about actual blue fields, I came up with blue fields of sorrow. It just kind of flowed. I was inspired, not because of some major incident in my life but because of a simple name on a street sign. If I hadn’t relearned how to see dragons in the clouds a few years ago, I’d have never given the street named Bluefield a second thought. But I did. And you know what? It gave me a super cool section to my final Epertase installment.

That’s how a lot of ideas have come to me. It’s not as much because I’m some special creative person as it is that I’ve opened that creative door in my mind that often gets closed by other people with the stresses of growing up. If you want to write, especially fantasy or fiction in general, my best advice is to open that creative door again.

There is a lot to being an author, including hard work, a grasp of the language in which you are writing, and a measure of talent for telling stories. But the most important element, I believe, is that of imagination.

Ok, so it wasn’t a dragon I saw in the clouds . . .

It was a gigantic turtle with a long tail blowing a bubble. Hey, that gives me an idea for a children’s book.

Learn more about Doug and his works by visiting: www.epertase.com or www.rhemalda.com