Zarina Docken

Question:
I personally find it more difficult to make people laugh than to make them cry.  Can you share with Likha readers how you inject humor into your stories?

Answer:
It is very difficult to make readers laugh, in particular to make a wide range of readers laugh, since humor is such a subjective thing. I'm afraid, though, that I don't see one specific "how" in how I do it, so much as it boils down to a philosophy of life. I'll try to give you some background and a few examples.

I've had a fair amount of tragedy in my life, nothing so awful as to put me on a par with someone starving in Africa, but enough of it at a young age that I needed to develop coping mechanisms. For me, the most effective coping mechanism I've ever found is humor. It's a particularly good thing that I'm able to laugh at myself, since I've been known to do and say foolish things that warrant laughing at. I also found, when I was younger, that being 4'11, it was always better if I made the short jokes on myself before anyone else did; being Jewish, I made the Jewish jokes first too. I think I figured that being the source of the laughter was better than being the source of the ridicule.

As far as the writing goes, it all comes down to voice. When I sat down to take my first stab at writing a novel nearly 10 years ago, I was sure that the voice that would come out of me would be serious. After all, I wanted to write the Great American Novel. Doesn't everyone (if they're American, that is)? And the Great American Novel is not traditionally seen as being a comedy. But the voice that started to come out of me was a voice that likes to tell jokes, to look at the absurdities of life, and I've never been able to shake that. There're always some moving moments in the things I write, at least readers tell me that and I choose to believe them. But even six years ago, when I wrote a book about a septuagenarian who learns that her only child will predecease her, the letters my then agent got from publishers often said, "This book is so funny!" And I'd be sitting here thinking, "But it's a book about someone who's dying! She dies in the end!" And they'd say, "Oh, of course we cried when she died, but it's still a very funny book."

Then, too, the subject matter I choose, often being absurd in some degree, naturally lends itself to humor. My first novel, "The Thin Pink Line", was about a woman who fakes an entire pregnancy. With a premise like that, there's tons of fertile ground for humor. My third book, due out in July 2005, is called "A Little Change of Face", and it's about a very attractive, never married, 39-year-old librarian from CT who, for one reason and another, decides to sabotage her own looks so she can see what life is like once she's no longer one of the world's swans. Again, because I have a character doing something that is contrary to what most people do - most of us try to make ourselves look better, not worse - there's a lot of humor that can be mined.

I think it just finally boils down to a way of seeing. I don't think a writer can make themselves be funny and I obviously can't make myself be serious, not completely.

Lauren Baratz Logsted is the author of The Thin Pink Line, which is out in seven countries other than North America and has been optioned for a Hollywood film, and the sequel, Crossing the Line. Her third novel, A Little Change of Face, is due out in July 2005. A former independent bookseller, reviewer, freelance editor and writer, and window washer, she now writes full time.