Jackson Radcliffe's Blog - Posts Tagged "funny"
How I write
Writing’s not easy. You have to sit in a chair all day and move your fingers around rather quickly while staring at the words that appear magically on a screen in front of you. It’s hard work and really quite exhausting.
So when I’m not sitting indoors at my computer I like to work outside in my garden. In English we call that gardening, but if I understand correctly, Americans call a garden a yard and gardening yardwork. This confuses me, because in Britain a yard is an unpleasant square of concrete surrounded by a high brick wall and yardwork is what men with balls and chains around their ankles were made to do in Victorian times as punishment.
Have you ever heard of the Yard of Eden? Me neither.
Anyway, I have veered off topic. What I want to talk about here is what I do while I am gardening / doing yardwork. What I do is write. Or, more precisely, I think. This is the closest I ever get to multi-tasking. I call it duo-tasking and it doubles my efficiency, which is awesome if you think about it, which I do.
Now, when I say that I think while gardening, that is not strictly true. What I actually do is talk to myself.
Talking to yourself is what mad, crazy nutters do. However, if you write it down afterwards, you can claim that you are a writer and most people are OK with that.
So that’s what I do. You could call it yardwork. You could call it crazy, random mutterings. You could call it writing. Whatever it is, someone’s got to do it.
So when I’m not sitting indoors at my computer I like to work outside in my garden. In English we call that gardening, but if I understand correctly, Americans call a garden a yard and gardening yardwork. This confuses me, because in Britain a yard is an unpleasant square of concrete surrounded by a high brick wall and yardwork is what men with balls and chains around their ankles were made to do in Victorian times as punishment.
Have you ever heard of the Yard of Eden? Me neither.
Anyway, I have veered off topic. What I want to talk about here is what I do while I am gardening / doing yardwork. What I do is write. Or, more precisely, I think. This is the closest I ever get to multi-tasking. I call it duo-tasking and it doubles my efficiency, which is awesome if you think about it, which I do.
Now, when I say that I think while gardening, that is not strictly true. What I actually do is talk to myself.
Talking to yourself is what mad, crazy nutters do. However, if you write it down afterwards, you can claim that you are a writer and most people are OK with that.
So that’s what I do. You could call it yardwork. You could call it crazy, random mutterings. You could call it writing. Whatever it is, someone’s got to do it.
So you think that’s funny?
Why does comedy so often involve human suffering? People slip on banana skins. They act stupid. Outrageous things happen to them. And we laugh.
Are we monsters? Do we relish the suffering of others?
Or is laughter a self-defence mechanism? Instead of being a sign of depravity, it’s a way of coping with living in a world that is profoundly and shockingly unsympathetic to human existence.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that we laugh till we cry; that our laughter comes with tears. If we didn’t laugh at misfortune, we’d have to sob instead.
It seems fitting that my first novel, The Yoga Sutras, was a comedy. It reflects an unconscious inability to treat myself seriously as a writer, even though my writing is terribly serious to me - a matter of life and death.
So by all means laugh at my jokes. But please don’t laugh at my ideas, because I would hate that. It’s probably what a writer fears most, after obscurity. That's the greatest fear. To be ignored would be horrible. So awful I might have to laugh.
Are we monsters? Do we relish the suffering of others?
Or is laughter a self-defence mechanism? Instead of being a sign of depravity, it’s a way of coping with living in a world that is profoundly and shockingly unsympathetic to human existence.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that we laugh till we cry; that our laughter comes with tears. If we didn’t laugh at misfortune, we’d have to sob instead.
It seems fitting that my first novel, The Yoga Sutras, was a comedy. It reflects an unconscious inability to treat myself seriously as a writer, even though my writing is terribly serious to me - a matter of life and death.
So by all means laugh at my jokes. But please don’t laugh at my ideas, because I would hate that. It’s probably what a writer fears most, after obscurity. That's the greatest fear. To be ignored would be horrible. So awful I might have to laugh.
