Humor in YA Fiction: A Serious Post
When I started out in writing, it seemed to me that there were funny books and there were serious books. I gravitated toward the funny books. Real life can be so depressing that I didn’t see a reason to bring myself down with a sad fictional world.
(5 Things All YA Novels Need to Succeed.)
This put me in quite a pickle when I wanted to write my first book about a protagonist who had bipolar disorder. Nothing about bipolar disorder is inherently funny. I needed to process my own recent diagnosis and find a way to believe that everything was going to be okay. I told my husband, “I’m going to write a book about mental illness, and no one is going to kill themselves in it. There will also be a pug dog in it, and the dog will not be dying either. These are my requirements.”
How to balance humor with emotion wasn’t even something I considered. I just needed to write. So I started writing the book.
In the book, whenever the protagonist, Natalie, was in an emotional situation, she would turn to jokes to relieve the tension. A mentor friend of mine (Katherine Fleet) pointed out to me, “It’s interesting that Natalie likes to hide any deep emotion behind a wall of humor. She needs to be more vulnerable with the reader.”
I felt like responding, “Okay, Katherine. Are we talking about Natalie here, or are we talking about me? Because I can stop emailing you memes, but that’s your loss because my memes are hilarious.”
But she was right. Not only did Natalie need to lower her guard, but her author did too. It can be difficult to sustain emotional scenes. Sad and scary things make me feel, well—sad and scared. But once I realized the importance of these scenes, I got better at entering that brain space. Especially while revising, I looked at my jokes and asked myself what each one’s purpose was. If its purpose was to break tension in an emotional scene, I generally took it out. Katherine helped me write Natalie in a way that didn’t shy away from deeply vulnerable and emotional moments.
The reader needs those scenes to feel what your character is feeling and follow along on their emotional journey. When it came time to draft my newest book, Shooting for Stars, I carried that newfound awareness with me. I’ve learned that, as is true with most things in life, you need a balance of serious and silly.
Check out Christine Webb’s Shooting for Stars here:
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Shooting for Stars is about a teenaged astronomer whose mom died (not funny), and she lives with a dad so dedicated to his work that he doesn’t take care of basic needs around the house (also not funny). She has a pet rat named Five (kind of funny), and her scientist dad starts dating a famous make-up vlogger (very funny).
When I try to balance humor and emotion in my books, it feels like I’m snorkeling. I like things to be fun and light, like at the surface where you can, you know, BREATHE. But if you always stay at the surface, you miss out on a lot. Dive deeper, and you see the intricacies of the coral and the brilliant colors of the fish. You can look a fish dead in the eye and marvel at the fact that, for this brief moment, you have a tiny connection with this being who you will in all likelihood never see again. There’s magic under the water.
Perhaps you’re reading this and thinking, Pfft! All of my writing is already deeply emotional. What are you trying to tell me here? Well, I have a friend, Kacey, who was struggling in the opposite direction. Kacey’s writing is deep and thought-provoking and occasionally tragic. Yet the industry kept telling her that her books weren’t “light” enough, and she would say to me, “I’m writing about a debilitating terminal illness. What part of that is supposed to be light?!”
Back to the snorkeling analogy: Kacey can stay underwater way longer than I can, but eventually everyone needs to breathe. When she worked on her next novel, her goal was to add some levity to the gravity, and—voila! A cranky cat named Gibbs appeared. Her characters didn’t have to be hilarious, she didn’t need to make light of a sad situation, and her writing style didn’t need a complete overhaul. She just needed to give us readers some space for air. A socially adverse and sometimes feral ball of fur is great for that.
When starting a new writing project, I recommend asking yourself if your tendency is to swim at the surface or to stay down among the coral. Find ways to balance both in your work, in a way that stays true to your characters and your voice. Over time, you’ll learn to enjoy the benefits of both spaces, and your reader will be more willing to take the dive with you from start to the end.
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