Writing for Humor and Poignancy
My readers are always emailing me, "Preston L. Allen, how do you do it? When we read your stuff, we feel like laughing. We feel like crying."
Okay, let's look at the thing I'm best known for, the Brown Sugar stories. Erotica. I am not an erotic writer. I am a tragic-comic, a writer of poignant stories that get to the heart of what makes people tick (See "Churchboys and Other Sinners"). I am a satirist, a writer of stories that expose hypocrisy. I am a writer of stories that also say take it easy, don't be so uptight, laugh a little. I am a writer of stories that say no matter who you're pretending to be, chill out, we're all just human, baby. I am a literary writer. I hold degrees in writing. I win awards. I write with style. I pay attention to craft.
So my agent came to me and said, "Do you have an erotic story? There's an opportunity to be read by hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions." Erotica? "No," I said to my agent, "I have no erotica. But I do have a story about a woman who is in love with her sister's husband." So I sent this story (NADINE'S HUSBAND) off to the editor of the series, Carol Taylor, who loved it and the next thing I know, I am published in BROWN SUGAR #1 and people are coming to my readings hoping to hear something hot and steamy. What they end up hearing is something even better--they hear LITERATURE and they love it. They sit there in my audience tittering with laughter or applauding or shouting AMEN. They come up to me afterward and say, "I'm not one who normally likes to read, but I love your stories. They are so funny and so deep!" Others, who have perhaps thought about it more, say to me, "I see now that all of your stories are like that, even your erotica. Your stories are about people, real people. They're sad. And they're so funny." Yeah. That's me. I am a tragic-comic. I am tragicomic.
The interviewer on NPR's Miami affiliate WLRN said about my novel HOOCHIE MAMA, a thriller, "The body count is pretty high in this book. The murders are gruesome. The mystery is tough to solve. It is a dizzying, page-turning read. But I'd like you to talk about something else I noticed."
"What's that?" said I.
"It had me cracking up in places."
"Is that a problem?" said I.
"No. I just didn't expect it."
"Expect it," said I. "Life is like that sometimes. When I was a kid growing up in Boston, there was this heavy snowstorm. School was canceled the next day, but my mom hadn't listened to the radio, so here we are all bundled up in our coats and gloves and ski masks, trudging through the snow and ice. I was pretty agile on the icy sidewalk, being six or seven years old. My mother was not. I was racing on a few feet ahead of her when I heard her suddenly cry out. I turned just in time to see her feet slide out from under her as she fell hard on her butt and then slide under a parked car. Only her head was sticking out. To me, it was so funny, like something you'd see on TV, and so I started to laugh. My mother crawled out from under that car and she said to my laughing face, 'You're laughing at your mother? You're laughing at your own mother? You only have one mother. When I'm dead and gone and you have no one else to take care of you, I want to see how funny you think that is. Never laugh at your mother, you hear me?' By this time I was nodding my head and crying big icy tears, thinking about how sad my little life would be without my mother."
"What is your point?" the interviewer said.
"It was funny. It was sad, but it was funny, too."
"That your mother slid under a car?"
"That she fell and slid like that was sad and funny--that is slapstick. That I had laughed at my own mother was sad and funny--that is dramatic irony. That she had cleverly turned the tables on me and made me cry BECAUSE she was my mother was sad and funny--that is another kind of dramatic irony--that is reversal. When you hear a story like that, even if you don't crack up, you bite your lip a little bit--because it really is . . . funny. The scary part is not the kid who laughs at his mother who slides under a car like that, but the kid who doesn't laugh. The kid who doesn't get it. That kid is too serious. That's the kid who is going to grow up to be a psychopath if we're not careful."
So I continued to write my tragicomic novels, HOOCHIE MAMA, BOUNCE, and COME WITH ME, SHEBA while my relationship with the Brown Sugar series expanded into three erotic sequels (or perhaps a serialization) of the original story, pieces that appeared as "If He Only Knew," "Who I Choose to Love," and "The Day After You." The series came to an end with BROWN SUGAR 4, SECRET DESIRES, and I believed that so too was ended my career as a penner of erotic prose until Carol Taylor approached me about a new potential series of erotic travel stories. Okay, so I submitted a piece for that collection, which she approved of, and after she had edited it and we were ready to put it to bed, she sent me an email that said among other things, "You are funny." But not funny ha-ha. Not exactly. Tragicomic. I was glad she had noticed.
If you try to be funny when you write, there is a very high likelihood that you are going to fail. You are going to end up being silly instead of funny. Silly like little children telling made up stories are silly. Silly like SNL sketches. Silly like slapstick. Silly like a buffoon. Silly like a lie in the presence of those who know the truth. To be genuinely funny, you must know the truth and write it as it is without embellishments.
In one of my most popular short stories "Is Randy Robert's There?" Crab Orchard Review 1996, reprinted with permission in Churchboys and Other Sinners, Carolina Wren Press 2002), Monique has a flashback to her junior high school crush, the handsome athlete Randy Roberts, a boy she never said a word to because she was too shy and had very low self-esteem due to her belief that she was ugly. Monique would sit in the chemistry class she had with Randy Roberts and just stare at him. One day she gets a note from Randy Roberts that reads, "I think you are beautiful. Tomorrow I want to kiss you in front of everybody who has ever laughed at you, so wear something nice. We'll show them." So Monique and her aunt, who raised her, max out a credit card on a new outfit and sit up all night fixing up Monique's hair. The next day, Monique discovers that Randy Roberts is gone. He has transferred to a new school out of state. Yesterday was his last day. The note was a prank, and now all of Randy Robert''s friends in the chemistry class sit and laugh at Monique who is all dressed up, "too dressed up," she says, "for the chemistry test I failed."
Now, to my thinking, this is a sad moment in Monique's story, but the audience never fails to respond to it, often with titters and head nods and lip biting. What they are acknowledging with their laughter is not only that this is a comic moment, but that this is how life is sometimes. This is a true moment. They are reacting to the truth of the scene, which is when we are in love, we often let our guard down and things like this happen. The warning is that people, even the ones you love, can be cruel, so you must be ever vigilant. Similarly, in "Nadine's Husband," my first story in the BROWN SUGAR series (Plume Penguin 2001), little sister Pam falls in love with big sister Nadine's husband, Johnny. Now Johnny and Pam discover that they are soulmates, and it is clear to all that Johnny should leave cruel, adulterous Nadine and take up with her younger sister, who is as sweet and pure as he is. So Pam begins to prepare for the day when Johnny will announce his break with her sister, a day which never arrives. Instead, Pam awakens one morning to find Johnny gone--he has returned to his wife (cruel and adulterous though she be). When he and Pam meet again, she is stunned that he is back to treating her like a kid sister.
I have received as many emails about how sad that final scene is as about how funny it is. In most cases, when I write, I do not intend to be funny. I intend to tell the truth and the truth itself is often funny. I, personally, have never found that final scene of "Nadine's Husband" to be funny--I see only the sadness in it--but one reader kept telling me, trying to explain her reaction to the scene, "But see? Pam should have known better. It's her sister's husband. She's just crazy in love and can't see the obvious, but the man did the right thing. She put herself in that situation and she got what she deserved. I feel very sad for her, but what did she expect?"
One of my favorite short stories is Louise Erdric's "The Leap" (collected in David Madden's A Pocketful of Prose Vintage Short Fiction) in which the narrator recalls waking up one evening in her childhood to her house on fire. She lives in a small town in the northeast, and the volunteer fire department has not brought a ladder long enough to reach her window, or perhaps the ladder has broken, I forget which. The little girl is doomed to be overcome by the smoke and flames, except that her mother, a woman in the soft roundness of her middle years, is a former circus acrobat, who disrobes to her underwear and pearls, climbs a nearby tree and LEAPS to her child's window ledge. She puts the little girl, our narrator, in her lap and then they jump to the firefighter's net waiting below.
This scene is many things, including heroic. What has always struck me, however, is how truly funny it is in some ways. When all else fails, mother strips down to her underwear and pearls. She is not wearing Victoria's Secret. She is wearing matronly underthings and perhaps a girdle. The pearls are a nice (true) detail. She is the kind of woman who would wear pearls, and perhaps forget to remove them in her haste to save her child. Now she is standing before the house on fire and the gathered crowd, thus stripped down. What must they be thinking seeing her thus disrobed? What would you be thinking at this point? They do not know of her history as a circus performer--even her husband, the narrator's father, has in this moment of crisis forgotten that his dear sweet wife used to sail through the air with the greatest of ease on her flying trapeze. It is only when mother begins to scale the tree that father remembers and perhaps begins to understand that all may not be lost.
But again, dear reader, you are among the gathered crowd watching this middle aged woman in her underwear ascend a tree, a tree too many yards away from the house to seem of much use--to anyone with normal abilities, that is. You watch as the woman in pearls disappears in the branches then reappears on a level with the child's window. Then you watch as she bends a branch and leaps to the ledge, like flying, and grabs onto it. She is now suspended above all in her underwear and pearls. Then the point of view shifts to the child in the burning building--a child who sees her mother' smiling face suddenly appear in the window. Her house is on fire and now her mother is at her window in her underwear. Her mother is all business. She points to the latch on the window, indicating that the child is to open it, please. The child obeys, opening the latch, and now the mother is in her room with her and the advancing flames. Then they are flying through the air and then falling to the net waiting below.
In the hands of a lesser writer, Erdrich's scene would yield to melodrama and slapstick, for indeed there are places in it that could be expanded to the detriment of the whole. What Erdrich does is write the truth of the scene: we will do whatever it takes to save our children, embarrassment and ladylike manners be damned. Reading the scene, we nod our heads and smile, recalling similar (though perhaps smaller) acts of embarrassing heroism our own parents may have performed on our behalf. Now if the little girl in Erdrich's story had said to her mother, "Mommy, you look so funny. Ha-ha-ha. You're not wearing any clothes," her mother might well have turned the tables on her and chided, "You're laughing at your mother. You're laughing at your own mother. You only have one mother . . ."
My point is this. If you want to be sad, or funny, as a writer, you have first to learn to be honest; for only the truth of what we are as humans is both sad and funny at the same time.
|
