How to Write Like a Funny Woman

Elissa Bassist recently took some improv classes. She's trying to use those tools in her writing.

From a story on the Rumpus...

1. Be in a scene (a place, a time, an action). I used to start scenes with a joke and go from there; one day my teacher, the venerable Chelsea Clarke, stopped me and said, “Be rowing a boat.” I began rowing a fake boat, and suddenly, I was a character in a boat; the audience knew where I was and what I was doing.

It’s similarly knee-jerk to start a chapter discussing the metaphysics of unrequited love or whatever, but that’s disorientating to your reader because it’s like soliloquizing in space. Put your reader in a scene. Make one character be unrequitedly in love with another character rowing her boat.

1a. Relatedly, I wrote a chapter that is 80% me talking about my emotions and blowjobs. After an hour-long conversation with an editor about how to organize/overhaul this chapter, she finally said, “Elissa! Get out of the talky headspace, and present [verb] moments, rather than talk on and on about them. Basically, I need to see the blowjob. Take me into the blowjob room.” Take your readers into the blowjob room.

2. Play to the top of your intelligence. I wish I could explain this one better, but I think I just like the phrase, “Play to the top of your intelligence.” (Here is what Google says: ”If your character is stupid, be smart about how you’re stupid,” which I take to mean, be stupid in a specific way).

2a. I am trying to write a book. The book begins with me as a college student, a nineteen-year-old girl. I did a lot of dumb shit at that age. As the writer/present-day narrator (no longer a college student, no longer a teenager), I have to be smart about showing that young girl doing dumb shit.