writing craft – Patricia J. Parsons

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?

I started my writing career as a health and medical writer for magazines back in the old days when they were in print and the process for querying took months via snail mail. I then morphed into writing and co-writing books on the same subjects. Many (if not most) of my nonfiction books have been prescriptive nonfiction. I had a brief foray into creative nonfiction when I wrote a memoir, but until I started writing fiction, I spent most of my time honing my writing shops in the world of prescriptive nonfiction books.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a video on WRITE. FIX. REPEAT. where I tackled five tips for writing creative nonfiction. (You can watch it here.) This week, I’m tackling prescriptive nonfiction, whose techniques are also valuable for content creators, PR writers, and anyone who wants to teach someone something.

The problem I’ve seen over the years is that many writers don’t know the difference between narrative and prescriptive nonfiction and often muddle them together, resulting in a mishmash of writing that benefits no one—not even the writer.

So, this week, I have five tips for prescriptive nonfiction based on writing almost a dozen trade and textbooks in this genre.

Tag: writing craft

What I’ve Learned About Writing Humour

Using Words Correctly is Key to Professional Writing: Compound Words

Writing Prescriptive Nonfiction