WE NEED LAUGHTER

“Laugh whenever you can. Keeps you from killing yourself when things are bad. That and whisky.” 
- Mark Twain


1.) DON'T TAKE LIFE SO SERIOUSLY -


"They also serve who only stand and wait.  But the pay is shit."
- George Carlin

We all have obstacles in life and we all make mistakes.

There is no reason to beat yourself up over it.

In fact, if you can laugh light-heartedly at your own foibles, you'll find that you give yourself that extra happiness and confidence boost that can get you over any hurdle.

This also extends to other people. Try not to be too hard on others -- a smile and a chuckle teaches more than criticism.


2.) FIND THE HUMOR IN A BAD SITUATION -


“Laughter is like a hurricane: once it reaches a certain point, it becomes self-feeding, self-supporting.

You laugh not because the jokes are funny but because your own condition is funny.”
― Stephen King, The Dark Tower

Bruce Willis saved my sanity.

If you've watched the first DIE HARD, Bruce exhibits a pattern:

Things go terribly wrong, rubble falls on him, and he crawls out laughing:

"Come to L.A.  We'll have some laughs, see the sights!"

I adopted the habit: if I dropped something or banged my shin or made a mistake, I would laugh at the absurdity of the human condition.

Guess what: I most always end up laughing for real instead of swearing, raising my blood pressure.

Sure, there are some situations that are genuinely sad and certainly not laughing matters.

However, most situations in life have an ironic or ludicrous side to them.

The next time you feel the stress levels rising,

take a minute to think about the irony of the situation and allow yourself to laugh over the things you cannot control.

This will decrease the amount of cortisol that your body produces due to stress, lowering your blood pressure, blood sugar levels and heart rate.


3.) SURROUND YOUR SELF WITH FUN PEOPLE  ...  OR PUPPIES.


“Ain't it funny how axe handles are made of wood?  It's like the ultimate insult to trees.”
― Mark Twain

As the saying goes, mirthful laughter is contagious, so make a point to seek out positive people who aren't afraid to laugh at themselves and who have a knack for finding humor in life's situations.

Puppies and kittens are especially adept at finding laughter and joy in everyday moments.

Studies show that people with pets have lower levels of depression and stress and are less likely to suffer from heart disease.


4.) SKINNY-DIP YOUR MIND INTO THE POOL OF HAPPY MEMORIES -


"Assassins are impressive.  It ain't the killing part that impresses me.  It's how they up and found a way to put 'ass' into their name twice."
- Mark Twain

Perhaps a friend told you a great joke the other day, your children or pets did something amusing, or maybe you watched a funny movie recently that had you in stitches.

Call on these memories frequently, especially when you are feeling sad, angry or stressed.

Sometimes just reliving a funny moment can cause the endorphins to kick in, which act as natural painkillers and mood boosters.

OBSCENITY_OR F--- YOU SAY!

Obscenities.

What are we to do with them as writers?

Pretend they don't exist?

Scatter them willy-nilly throughout our novel?

F--- has become the duct tape of modern speech. Without it some rap singers would be neutered.

Look at some of the books out there. I have.

Where is the heart, the soul, the marrow in the bones?

Oddly enough, those things are often found in the profanity of said novel,

in how that profanity is used, and in who uses it when.

Profanity is much like spice in a meal. Too much blunts the taste of the meal ... or the novel.

Yet, take out the "real" in a novel, and you neuter Chekhov into the artificiality of Mansfield.

Better to drink water than near-beer.

Profanity lends a realism to novels.

Not that without it, novels cannot have the sense of the real.

In Dostoevsky, there is such a burning truth in the prose that it changes you even as you read it.

THE HITCH HIKER'S GUIDE TO PROFANITY :

A.) KNOW WHERE TO LOB THE GRENADE :

Never in the structure of the novel. Only in dialogue. And then only when unavoidable.

Even in first person? Yes. It's strange I know. But it is a rule like gravity.

Of course there are exceptions. According to the strict rules of aerodynamics, a bumble bee ought not to be able to fly.

It doesn't know any better, and so it zips along quite merrily on its buzzing, pollinating way.

Trust your instinct on first person narration and profanity.

B.) MOST SLANG HAS A SHORT SHELF LIFE :

It takes three years at the fastest for your book to be published. Don't use slang that may well go stale in that time.

Don't be worried about being timely :

use nice Anglo-Saxon words that have stood the test of a thousand years. You won't be sorry that you played it safe with swearing.

C.) YOU'RE NOT GEORGE CARLIN :

He wrote for shock ... and for reflection on why we are who we are and why we say what we do.

Don't be the little boy writing gross words on the wall to be smart.

One, you're not very smart if that is why you are doing it.

Two, even if you succeed, you have jarred your reader out of the flow of your story.

D.) THE PILOT ONLY EJECTS WHEN HE IS ABOUT TO CRASH :

Remember : the jet pilot only ejects from the cockpit when he is about to crash.

So don't crash your novel unless you're ending it.

Using profanity for shock value blunts very quickly.

Never use a swear word without first seeing if you can't replace it with another word.

Never make the waters choppy if you don't have to.

Then, there is the strange fact that some very common words bring us up short when we see them on the printed page.

Take "fart" for example. It just comes out oddly.

How often have you seen it in a novel you've recently read? Not often I bet.

Then, again ...

E.) QUEEN VICTORIA IS DEAD, AND I DON'T FEEL SO WELL MYSELF :

Put fornicate, copulate, co-habit, or consummate in the mouth of anyone in your novel but a priest or nun,

and you will make your entire novel as plastic and false as a Barbie sitting next to a Ken.

F.) DON'T PUT A BLU-RAY INTO YOUR DVD PLAYER :

Each person in your novel should have his or her own style or voice.

Not everyone curses.

And not everyone curses in the same way or at the same ratio.

(Check out Lenny's World {November 8th} for an excellent post on voice in the world of writing http://lennys-world.blogspot.com/ )

My character, Sam McCord, uses profanity very little.

I explain it in the course of my novel. Elu, his blood brother, uses none and there is a valid reason for that given in the course of events.

The street people of the French Quarter are another matter.

Victor Standish, the 13 year street gypsy, has a colorful vocabulary which he tries to prune for the sake of his mentor, Samuel McCord.

F.) FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS AND THE CASH REGISTER RINGS :

Fact of life #1 : Publishing is a business. A shaky business at the moment. No publisher wants to chase away customers.

Fact of life #2 : Profanity upsets some people. So how to write about rough people without using their profanity? Hemingway did this in FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS :

“The man, Agustin, spoke so obscenely, coupling an obscenity to every noun as an adjective, using the same obscenity as a verb,

that Robert Jordan wondered if he could speak a straight sentence” ( Chapter 3).

This tells the reader that, yes, these people are rough and foul-mouthed; so, just take that as a given

and move on with the story. Since that novel has never gone out of print, most readers must be comfortable with that.

G.) MARK TWAIN WAS RIGHT :

"Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer."

"The idea that no gentleman ever swears is all wrong. He can swear and still be a gentleman if he does it in a nice and benevolent and affectionate way."

"There ought to be a room in every house to swear in. It's dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that."

In other words, when there is no other word which means exactly the same thing and gives the same effect, use the profanity.

H.) A LAST WORD FROM HEMINGWAY :

In a letter to his publisher and mentor, Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway ended the letter about profanity with ... "F-ck the whole business. That's legal, isn't it?"
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