One thing I’ve always considered to be important for writers is to be able to use their previous knowledge and skills in their writing. For me, that began with transferring my nonfiction research skills to historical fiction. Over the years, however, I’ve followed my bliss more or less and written whatever story crept into my mind. My new book is no different in that respect, but it has an added element of past knowledge, namely, my background in ethics. (Bet you didn’t see that one coming!)
When my novel We Came From Away was named a finalist for the 2025 Stephen Leacock Medal for Literary Humour earlier this year, some of my former students probably thought it was a clerical error. After decades of teaching ethics and corporate communication, I was about as funny as a midterm exam.
My new novel, though? This is the book they always suspected was hiding in me.
Edgy, baffling, intellectually unsettling, my new novel, His Second Mistake, challenges everything you ever thought you believed about what is good, what is evil and whether good is right and evil is bad.
The story:
Rachel Underwood has it all—wealth, influence, and a gleaming reputation as one of Toronto’s most admired crisis managers and philanthropists. But beneath the charm lies a lethal secret. Driven by her abiding sense of justice, Rachel is also a killer, methodically hunting men who abuse women and evade accountability.
Detective Hannah Novak, eager to prove herself in homicide, finds her own sense of justice tested when a string of suspicious deaths points to a woman’s hand—and to someone dangerously close to her.
What follows is a tense and deeply personal game of cat and mouse between two women bound by friendship, loyalty, and lies. As the truth edges closer, each must decide how far she’s willing to go—and what price she’s willing to pay—for justice.
His Second Mistake is a gripping, disquieting exploration of power, betrayal, and the ethics of vengeance—where right and wrong blur, and friendship may be the deadliest weapon of all.
I had a surreal experience recently. My book, We Came From Away, was a 2025 finalist for one of the most coveted literary awards in Canada. It’s the Stephen Leacock Award for Literary Humour. If you don’t know who Leacock was, then you probably should.
He was only the best-known humourist in the world between 1915 and 1925.
British by birth, Leacock settled in Canada, where he first worked as a professor of economics at McGill University in Montreal and later relocated to a small town two hours north of Toronto. And it was to this town, Orillia (also the hometown of another Canadian great, Gordon Lightfoot, BTW), that he settled, and it was there that the Leacock Medal originated three years after he died in 1944.
So, as a finalist, I spent the weekend hobnobbing with some of Canada’s finest humorists: Wayne Johnston, Cathal Kelly, Terry Fallis. They were all there because they are all past winners. Anyway, at one point in the weekend, when someone said that we write humour because we’re all funny people, I almost swallowed my tongue. I am not funny. Not funny at all.
Here we are…the three finalists, cutting a cake that features the covers of all three short-listed books. (I think this photo is courtesy of Leacock Associates, https://tinyurl.com/2k58vj2n, but there are so many similar ones…)
And most of my writing isn’t funny—unless it is. Clearly, since my book was chosen as one of the three best humour books of the year, I must have done something right. The truth is that I don’t set out to write humour. Humour creeps in through my characters and their experiences. So, I thought I’d share some tips about injecting humour into your writing.
Okay, maybe I’m a bit funny when required to do a dreaded book signing. (photo credit: CG Production Company, via https://tinyurl.com/2k58vj2n)
Of course, there is nothing funny about much of what we write these days. If you’re an unfunny writer, you probably wonder why you’d even think about such a ludicrous idea. Well, there may be reasons you haven’t even thought about. I never set out to write humour, either.
I first thought about why one might even consider injecting humour into one’s writing. Here are some reasons.
Humour can make your writing more engaging.
Humour can help you build rapport with your readers.
Humour can sometimes provide contrast to the darker moments, heightening emotional impact.
Humour sharpens insight.
It can also help to light your own mood.
So, what have I learned about writing humour?
First, I learned that humour comes best when the writer first finds the truth and then exaggerates it.
Much of the best humour comes from seeing everyday truths in a sharper, exaggerated light. Take something relatable and then push it a little further into the absurd, the awkward, or the ironic.
I also learned that it’s essential to keep an eye on your audience’s sense of humour.
Not everything is funny to everyone, and in these days where so many people choose to take offence at just about anything, you sometimes have to tread carefully. I have an ongoing funny focus on vegans in this book—one of the characters is a vegan and she bears the brunt of the other character’s slightly off-kilter opinions on veganism and its dubious place in their lives. Sorry, not sorry if anyone is offended. It’s humour.
I also know this to be true: less is funnier. There is no need to over-explain the joke or pile on too many punchlines at once. I learned to trust my readers to “get it.” Often, one well-placed witty line or ironic observation is far funnier than paragraphs trying too hard.
Characters are the foundation of humour in any scene. Humour really shines when it grows organically out of your characters’ personalities or flaws. A character’s inappropriate observations ( my characters are the queens of the inappropriate). Even their deadpan reactions to events can be hilarious—and believable. It’s not about making the scene funny. It’s about following your character’s actions and reactions.
Overall, as I was writing We Came From Away and its sequel Meet Me in Miami, I realized that there’s a difference between writing comedy and writing humour. Comedy writers are going for the gags. Going for the laughs. Humour writers know that there is humour in the mundane. It’s all about how you see it.
Not all my writing is funny, and that’s great for my humour writing because when the characters and situations are funny, it just happens.
Now, when I’m not writing stories that make people laugh, I’m writing mysteries and thrillers. A genre change, you say? Why, yes. Why not?
Have you ever experienced a book whose setting itself was a living, breathing part of the story? That the setting is so alive and so real in your mind that the story couldn’t be told without it? Of course, you have. That’s what happens when your setting becomes a character, and that’s when your story becomes even more compelling.
Further, this is a technique not only for fiction writers. Consider the setting in true-crime nonfiction, or memoir, or biography. Even real places with real people can come alive and be another essential character.
Two years ago, my novel “We Came From Away” debuted. Set on the island of Newfoundland, the story would be nothing without its setting. Readers told me they felt as if they were there—they could feel the place. When a reader feels the place—the setting—it has come alive. And the truth is that the story in “We Came From Away” would be nothing without the setting.
Here are some of the pieces of the setting for the novel from that trip I took to the island of Newfoundland a couple of years ago. These became part of the setting’s backstory.
When I was writing that book, I learned a lot about how a setting comes alive with personality and purpose. In this episode of WRITE. FIX. REPEAT. I’m sharing five tips I learned.
Patricia J. Parsons 