I would offer an alternative to that, which may appeal to those who still want to tell a story that many would find silly on its face, but who don't want to be cracking wise in the text. And it is what I call The Absurd Played Straight.
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| And as you can see, I have some experience with it. |
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In a Distant Future, Man's Best Friend Seeks Answers
If you're a regular reader, and you're a fan of my work, then you've probably seen the way I execute this particular style of writing. Whether it's in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, two hardboiled crime novels where the entire cast are made up of NYC street animals like stray dogs, cats, pigeons, and foxes, or you've come across my tabletop RPG Army Men: A Game of Tactical Plastic where you take on the roles of plastic people in a plastic world fighting for their survival, you're already familiar with my take on The Absurd Played Straight.
However, perhaps the best way to explain how this style of humorous writing works is to point at one project that I think did it really, really well... a little game called Pugmire.
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| Seriously, check it out if you haven't! |
Now, for those who have never come across this game before, Pugmire is a sci-fi RPG set in the far, far future. Humanity is long gone, but dogs, cats, and others have evolved (possibly through the help of laboratory experimentation) into bipedal creatures living in a medieval-esque civilization. Bits and pieces of ancient technology have been discovered, referred to as magic, and are used as potent tools. Humanity is a myth that has taken on a god-like position to many of the good dogs, who are adventuring throughout the world in search of treasure, and knowledge of the lost and distant past.
We, as the players, know the truth, but the characters we play do not. However, while this world is very silly from our perspective, the flip side of that coin is that it can still be used to tell very serious stories. Because while we can sit there and laugh at the puns, and the misunderstandings of these adventuring canines, we can still get wrapped up in the drama of their lives. Whether it's the stray who's lost their pack time and time again until they can't get close to anyone, or the adopted young noble trying to prove he truly belongs among the city's purebred elites, or just watching the big, drooly mongrel sacrifice themselves to save their friends from certain doom, it's possible to take a ridiculous set up, and still tug on one's heartstrings with it.
In fact, I'd argue that it's a little easier in some ways. If you have an absurd setup for a story, it lowers the audience's guard somewhat, and makes them even more susceptible to plot twists and impactful moments because they simply aren't expecting those things.
A Final Note on Defying Expectations
Throughout this entry I have referred to The Absurd Played Straight as a type of comedy writing, because that is the typical reaction we have to taking the absurd at face value. If you see a black, undulating horror from the void beyond time rear up out of a summoning circle, and it gets a pat on the head while being referred to affectionately as Icky by the occultist it snuck up on, that is a jarring mismatch between tone and expectation. The result is that, more often than not, we laugh. Juxtaposition like that is funny.
But funny is not all this kind of story has to be.
Like I said above, what may seem fun and silly on the surface (because many absurd concepts are very silly) can often get serious or poignant once you've gotten the audience to dive in with you. To return to my own work, you can tell a gritty, horrors-of-war story rife with trauma and post-traumatic stress using my Army Men RPG, if that's the route you want to go. And, to be clear, the idea of your plastic army men toys breaking down while thinking about the squad mates they've lost on the line is absurd... but it's an absurdity that hits on a tragic truth, and lets you tell a story that might be too real with flesh-and-blood characters in a "normal" war story. Similarly, I've had to tell multiple buyers that Marked Territory is not a children's book, despite the absurd premise. Because when it comes time to throw down, as happens in every good noir mystery, Leo fights like an alley cat... and alley cats leave crushed skulls and spilled guts in their wake. There's not a lot of violence in his books, but when it happens it's nasty, brutal, and visceral, which hits the reader much harder because they're not really expecting it while reading a story about a Maine Coon solving an animal mystery in the heart of New York City.
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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!
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