Tag: Damon Runyon

Writing Tip — The Importance of Humor

happyw-3046563_1280Humor in the arts has a bad reputation.

It’s not considered as worthy as drama. How many comedies have won the Oscar for Best Picture? Not many. Yet humor helps us throughout our lives. I think it’s a necessary quality to cultivate. The importance of humor in my life is enormous.

I’ve suffered from anxiety since I was a child and from depression since at least high school. When I moved to a new city and spent a year looking for a job, Erma Bombeck’s funny essays on family life came to the rescue. When I was anxious while attending a writers’ conference, I relaxed with P.G. Wodehouse’s hilarious account of how he started his writing career. Damon Runyon’s tales of New York City gangsters and gamblers of the 1920’s and 1930’s and the outdoor misadventures of Patrick F. McManus have lifted my mood time and again.

Some people think if you retain a sense of humor in serious situations, it’s not that serious. But I think the opposite is true. When life is at its most tragic or serious, that’s the time to find something to smile about. The circumstances of the tragedy are nothing to laugh about, but we still need to turn to some kind of humor to ease our pain.

When my grandmother died, it helped my family to share stories, especially funny ones. Like her war with the moles who riddled her yard in the country. Once she moved to the house next door to my parents, she became convinced that groundhogs could tunnel under her deck and into her basement. Being able to laugh about good memories of a deceased loved one is a great gift for those who remain.

One of the best demonstrations of humor in tough times is enacted in the 1942 movie Sullivan’s Travels. A Hollywood director, who has made his career in slapstick comedies, wants to film a drama about the Great Depression because he thinks depicting real-world suffering is a more worthwhile project.

He disguises himself as a hobo to collect background material. Through a series of events, he find himself convicted of a crime and sent to a prison farm. When he and the other prisoners are shown a Mickey Mouse cartoon, he’s stunned to hear their uproarious laughter as well as his own.

After he makes it back to Hollywood, the director decides to return to comedy. He says, “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Do you know that’s all some people have?”

How has humor helped you during a tough time in your life?

7

Writing Tip — Favorite Stories

bookw-1076196_1280For some reason, mysteries and Christmas seem like a natural fit. Perhaps it’s because Christmas celebrates one of histories greatest mysteries, God becoming fully human.

Christmas mysteries have a long tradition. Christmas Eve, before TV and radio, was the time to tell ghost stories. In 1892, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote “The Blue Carbuncle”, in which Sherlock Holmes solves a mystery just a few days after Christmas, all due to an acquaintance finding a stolen jewel in the crop of his Christmas goose. The ending works in very naturally a demonstration of the Christmas spirit

619tzntvatl-_sx380_bo1204203200_If you are in the mood to mix mysteries with your holiday cheer, check out The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, edited by Otto Penzler. This wonderful book has mystery short stories for any taste — funny, supernatural, hard-boiled, or classic. Here are some of my favorites.

“The Blue Carbuncle” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A clever mystery and a lot of fun.

“The Flying Stars” by G.K. Chesterton. Father Brown confronts a jewel thief.

“Christmas Party” by Rex Stout. Archie Goodwin witnesses a murder at a party, and his boss, genius Nero Wolfe, must avoid becoming a suspect. This is one of my favorite Nero Wolfe stories because, in his peculiar way, Wolfe shows how much he values Archie.

“A Scandal in Winter” by Gillian Linscott. A young girl involves herself in an investigation conducted by an elderly Sherlock Holmes and Watson. I don’t like romance, but the romantic reason Sherlock Holmes is trying to clear a recent widow of suspicion of murder hooked me.

“The Killer Christian” by Andrew Klavan. A hit man finds salvation in a very moving and funny story with an ending that always makes me smile. I mentioned this story in my post about the author.

“Dancing Dan’s Christmas” by Damon Runyon. How Dancing Dan unloads some hot gems and avoids a nasty fate in 1930’s New York.

Bonus Stories

“Three Wise Guys” in Guys and Dolls by Damon Runyon.  Some crooks travel to rural Pennsylvania to recover stolen money. In another post, I wrote how much I love Damon Runyon’s Broadway short stories and to appreciate his writing style, you need to imagine the story being told with a thick New Yawk accent.

51s7yianu4l-_sx328_bo1204203200_Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie. Formerly entitled Murder for Christmas and A Holiday for Murder. I wrote in my post about Agatha Christie that this is one of my favorites among her novels. It captures my idea of a holiday family reunion going as badly as you can imagine.

What are your favorite Christmas reads, mysterious or not?

 

 

3

Writing Tip

snow-1209872_1280What I Learned from Damon Runyon

I learned “voice” from reading Damon Runyon.  A unique writing voice will intrigue readers and encourage them to keep reading.  On the websites of agents who represent writers, many of them state they are looking for novels with distinct voices.

I loved how Mr. Runyon tried to recreate the dialect of Prohibition and Depression eras New York with unusual rhythm and slang.  His style is so different he probably wouldn’t get published today.

The best way for me to write in a unique voice is in first-person.  My main character is Junior Lody, a shy, intelligent sixteen-year-old living in the remote mountains of contemporary West Virginia.  I try to use words only he would use.  So even though he is smart and likes to read, I don’t want to use big words that would make him sound like an adult.  For example, he wouldn’t a call girl “effervescent “.  He’d say “She was as bubbly as a shaken bottle of pop.”  “Pop” is the word for carbonated drinks in West Virginia and using colorful metaphors and similies is also common in that state.  I also think a teenager would use figures of speech instead of long words.

Sprinkling in regional words and slang makes it seem like the characters are actually from West Virginia.  “Sprinkling” is the rule to live by.  If I tried to reproduce the Appalachian accent exactly, I think readers would get so bogged down in deciphering it that they would lost interest.  So I just scatter in key words, such as using “y’uns” and dropping “g” off “ing” words.  I want the key words to flavor my writing, not be the whole recipe.

In that way, I think I give Junior a unique voice, which I owe to reading Mr. Runyon’s Broadway stories.

0

Writing Tip

empire-776799_1280Favorite Author — Damon Runyon

I want to share some of my favorite authors and what I learned from them.

I stumbled across a collection of short stories by Damon Runyon when I was seventeen.  I had seen the movie version of the 1950’s Broadway musical “Guys and Dolls” and enjoyed it, so I opened the book.

“When it comes on summer, and the nights get nice and warm, I love to sit on the steps in front of the bank at Forty-eighth Street and Seventh Avenue … Sometimes you can see very prominent citizens sitting with me on the bank steps, including such as Regret, the horse player, and old Sorrowful, the bookie, and Doc Daro and Professor D. and Johnny Oakley and The Greek, and often strangers in the city, seeing us sitting there and looking so cool, stop and take off their coats and sit down with us, although personally if I am a stranger in the city I will be a little careful who I sit down with no matter how hot I am.”          “Delegates at Large”

I had never read anything like it.  The stories are set in New York City, around Broadway, in th 1920’s and 1930’s, among criminals and semi-criminals.  Runyon invented a unique style to write these stories.  An unnamed narrator tells all the stories in first-person.  They are always in present tense, contain no contractions, and are filled with the slang of that area and time, like “roscoe” and “rod” for gun,  “beezer” for nose, “gendarmes” for police, and “shiv” for knife.  Every character is known by a nickname.  Many of the stories have a twist at the end and dark humor, running all the way to black.  Although the stories were written for pure entertainment, some have sad or grim endings.  And some make you laugh out loud.

I read all the stories I could find by Damon Runyon.  He wrote both fiction and nonfiction, but I think his Broadway stories are the best.  He created his own world, with its own language.  His characters were so colorful that they inspired their own adjective, “Runyonesque.”  Click here for the Goodreads site on Damon Runyon.

I’ll write about what I learned from reading Runyon next time.

 

0

Powered by WordPress.com.

Up ↑