{"id":2855,"date":"2011-11-16T08:42:00","date_gmt":"2011-11-16T13:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/?p=2855"},"modified":"2020-01-04T00:25:08","modified_gmt":"2020-01-04T05:25:08","slug":"advice-to-writers-who-want-to-do-humorous-fiction-1975-interview-with-p-g-wodehouse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/advice-to-writers-who-want-to-do-humorous-fiction-1975-interview-with-p-g-wodehouse\/","title":{"rendered":"Advice to writers who want to do humorous fiction. 1975 interview with P.G. Wodehouse"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>1975 interview with P.G. Wodehouse<\/h2>\n

I adore Wodehouse<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I appreciate serious novels, of course. I love novels that tackle Big Questions, and when they’re well-written I find them transporting.<\/p>\n

But I also adore humorous fiction, and Wodehouse is by far my favorite humorous fiction author. It’s partly the language — I’m a total Anglophile — and perhaps it’s also that we’ve got those Butterfields and Lydiards in the family tree but I so appreciate the English sense of humor as well.<\/p>\n

No surprise, then, that I view him as a writer to emulate — so much so that when I was starting my novel Can Job<\/em>, I spent some time studying the Wodehouse novel Leave It to Psmith<\/em> to understand how he put novels together.<\/p>\n

I did thing like count how many characters he uses, and created an outline of his plot to see how he handled pacing.<\/p>\n

Learn from the best, right?<\/p>\n

Now I discover this gem: an article online where Wodehouse passes along some tips for writers<\/a>!<\/p>\n

They are fantastic tips as well. Here’s a taste:<\/p>\n

[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a great slab of prose at the start. I think the success of every novel – if it’s a novel of action – depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, “What are my big scenes?” and then get every drop of juice out of them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He also says this, in answer to a question about what makes a story funny:<\/p>\n

I don’t think a man can deliberately sit down to write a funny story unless he has got a sort of slant on life that leads to funny stories. If you take life fairly easily, then you take a humorous view of things.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All in all a delightful little read. Many thanks to Abe Books for putting it online!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1975 interview with P.G. Wodehouse I adore Wodehouse. I appreciate serious novels, of course. I love novels that tackle Big Questions, and when they’re well-written I find them transporting. But I also adore humorous fiction, and Wodehouse is by far … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,3],"tags":[1727,332,241,1726],"class_list":["post-2855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-writing","tag-advice-to-writers","tag-p-g-wodehouse","tag-writing-2","tag-writing-humor"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2855"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6478,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2855\/revisions\/6478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}