If Brevity is the Soul of Wit, Can I Ever Write a Funny Book?

By Audrey Burges

My writing group’s conversation started, as it often does, with a question: can I write a funny novel? 

The topic started because I had been trying and failing to expand my satire writing into a full book. My most recent attempt to write a “lighthearted romantic comedy” took a hard left toward magical realism, zoomed right across a dark and gothic river, and rapidly turned into a project my husband archly (and incorrectly) described as “Pretty Woman meets Jane Eyre.” 

A laugh riot, it was not. My effort did, at least, yield another satire piece (about my utter and complete inability to write sex scenes), but it did not yield a funny book. None of my books, so far, have been funny.

I didn’t set out to be a funny writer, though my origin story—to use a superhero term—should have given me a clue. I started writing because of a pungent, horseradish-laced cranberry relish. More specifically, I wrote a short vignette for an NPR content call about Mama Stamberg’s Cranberry Relish that was selected for an on-air reading, resulting in my spending approximately twenty-four elated hours telling everyone I knew, just in time to discover that the story had “gone in another direction” and my words were no longer on the selected route.

I was more devastated than a person writing about an onion, horseradish, and berry condiment probably had any right to be.

But as I tried to shake off the acceptance/rejection whiplash, a new thought occurred to me. I hadn’t written a non-work-related word since college. Not for twenty years. And the first ones I wrote—biting and shockingly pink though they were—had actually been noticed. Not just noticed, but liked. Perhaps I should…write more?

It was nearly November, and I’d told myself for years that I should try National Novel Writing Month, so I took the plunge.

One manuscript later, I started reading everything I could get my hands on about how to get published. Many recommendations hinged on building a platform, and a platform also meant bylines. Get published by…getting published.

I can do that, I thought. So I wrote a quick satire piece and submitted it to McSweeney’s Internet Tendency with no self-reflection whatsoever. The prompt rejection was kind, and it only made me more determined. More words! I thought. I can write more words.

And I had words to spare! Lots of them, in no particular order. When I started my first novel, I wrote such a cursory outline that I didn’t even catch a protagonist’s twenty-month pregnancy until my third draft of the book. Even saying that I was a “pantser” would have been an overstatement. It would have implied that I was organized enough to put pants on.

But more words is, it turns out, the very opposite of what satire requires. I didn’t have eighty thousand words to let my story stretch out and relax, like a cat in a sunbeam. I had—perhaps—one-hundredth of those words at my disposal, and that’s pushing it. Satire’s precision—in word choice, structure, and rhythm—is much more akin to poetry (and I am a deplorable poet). 

Writing satire forced me to contract my writing to its most salient points, and that meant engaging in another helpful exercise: figuring out what those points were and then refining them, over and over, until the smallest number of words carried the greatest impact. As a writer, it was exactly the practice I needed: it made me disciplined and, more importantly, much more aware of writing for an audience. It helped me identify how to carry a reader down a page, and how to seed my prose with little callbacks and inflection points to get them through a piece.

That discipline helped with storytelling, too, but I found it harder—much harder—to expand what I had contracted. Jokes—my jokes, at least—grow stale in too large a space. Seeing them standing alone makes me scramble to give them company, and soon the narrative gets lost in a tangled thicket of bad humor. Short pieces I can manage, but an entire novel eludes me. 

Once my stories exceed a thousand words, they grow from cute babies into broody teenagers, grab my car keys, and yell over their shoulders that I don’t understand them.

And maybe I don’t. There’s a lot I don’t understand. I started out as a simple woman who liked her cranberries with horseradish and thought it might be fun to jot down a few words about it, and somehow I became a Woman who Writes—quickly, surreptitiously, thumbs flying to record ideas in my Notes app before they get lost to dinner preparation or tantrum mitigation. Sometimes the notes are funny. Sometimes they’re about as far from funny as you can get. Sometimes I don’t know until I give them a little bit of space to drive. 

Maybe someday, they’ll lead me to a book that will make people laugh. But in the meantime, all I can do is enjoy the ride. With relish.

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Audrey Burges is a writer in Richmond, Virginia, and her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Into the Void, Gingerbread House Literary Magazine, The Belladonna, Slackjaw, and discarded construction paper on her children’s bedroom floors. You can read more of her words at audreyburges.com and follow her on Twitter, @audrey_burges.

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