Today is the 146^th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, and the 99^th anniversary of the sinking of the luxury liner Titanic.  RIP. 

Here’s another flower picture, but it has a purpose beyond making you wish you had a pretty garden, I promise.  My lilac bush would probably have bloomed more if I had remembered to deadhead it last year before it made seed pods.  And it’s tall and skinny, more like a tree.  I’ll have to encourage the suckers at the bottom to make it fill out.

Lilacs are the best-smelling flower in the world.  They have a sweet, powdery scent that somehow manages not to be cloying.  They smell purple, the way that peonies smell pink and roses smell red even when they’re not.   It’s so sad they don’t last very long.

Smell is the most powerful of all the senses.  Olfactory memories stored in our brain can be accessed instantly by a wafting, familiar odor.  The lingering smoke ghost on an old coat tucked in the very back of the closet, a whiff of your grandmother’s perfume in a crowded department store, the deep richness of freshly turned earth that catapults you back to your first garden.

Once, in high school, my drama class attended a speech tournament, and we found ourselves in a hallway at a college student union, near the cafeteria.  The short space had an attic smell, of dusty wood and old fabric, which smelled exactly like my great-grandmother’s house.  I stopped dead and just inhaled, while my classmates yelled at me to hurry up, come on, we had to be at the next event.  No really, you go on.

So many writers choose visual terms to describe things, probably because we’re seeing the action in our heads, like watching an internal movie.  It’s easy to forget that characters have other senses.  They will perceive the world through other means:  sound, touch, taste.

At one point in Rose’s Hostage, Libby is blindfolded and handcuffed, and she can only listen and smell.   She catches a bit of someone’s body odor, hears trains rumbling when they change getaway cars and the thud of her fellow hostage falling when they get out of the vehicle.

Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is all about smell.  The protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is born in mean circumstances with a gift:  an incredibly powerful sense of smell.  Alas, he has no scent of his own, and people react to him strangely.  He drifts through a world of odors, both putrid and sublime, and learns to hold them through the art of perfume-making.  Trouble starts when he finds the scent of a virgin girl enrapturing and desires to capture that.

The book is unique because it contains almost no dialogue.  A decent film with Alan Rickman was made from it.  Usually narration doesn’t work in a movie but it does here.  It’s impossible to translate the scents visually, and it does lose something when you can’t imagine them as in the book.  Smell-O-Vision would have been great for this one.

In prose, the only thing a reader has to go on is your description.  Mix it up a little by including smells.  Maybe your protagonist can walk into a bakery and smell a cinnamon bun that reminds him of the neighbor kid’s mother, the object of his most exquisitely tormented adolescent longings, who used to bake them.  He turns and sees a pale reflection that looks just like her in the shop window.  But it couldn’t be her; she died in a boat accident twelve years ago.

Write a scene using just sight.  Then rewrite it with just smell, then sound, etc.  See where your other senses lead you.

I didn’t make this picture, obviously.  But it’s a better way to open this post, which is about humor.

What strikes us as funny?  There are several kinds of humor.  Here are a few:

Slapstick

This is a very old form of humor, physical comedy characterized by broad and exaggerated action.  Slipping on a banana peel is an example of slapstick.  The late great John Ritter, playing Jack Tripper on the 1970s-80s sitcom Three’s Company, did a lot of slapstick on that show.  Huge reaction shots, hitting his head frequently, falling and breaking things were par for the course.

Puns

Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.

Most consider puns the lowest form of humor.  A play on words gives the joke a double meaning—the conventional one, i.e. silkworms make silk, it ends up in a tie—and the funny one. “Ha ha, the worms are in the tie.  Get it?”  the jokester says, and punches you in the arm.

Parody

Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a King Arthur parody by the amazing English comedy troupe.  Parody tells a familiar story in a new way, adding humorous elements that may be serious in the original.  For years MAD magazine (sadly gone downhill since the death of publisher William Gaines and the departure/demise of some of the Usual Gang of Idiots) had at least one parody of a popular movie in its magazine.   Or see this, a parody of a popular fashion item.

Black humor

This is when people joke about something that isn’t funny, like 9/11 or really gruesome accidents.   The worse the incident, the blacker the jokes.  There are two kinds of black humor:  one relieves tension or is generally funny.  Jokes cops make at a murder scene is an example of the former.   Another example is black comedy in films, designed to make you laugh and squirm at the same time.  It’s common in horror movies like Return of the Living Dead (also a parody) and Ravenous.

The other ticks people off.  Gilbert Gottfried’s recent remarks about the Japanese earthquake/tsunami disaster, the ones that got him fired from his job as the AFLAC duck, offended people.  Now they’re looking for a new duck.

Irony

A lot of people have trouble with this one.  It means the opposite of what you are saying, or of what is expected in a situation and what actually happens.  An example would be saying “Lovely weather we’re having,” in the middle of a blizzard.  I find the comic I posted at the beginning ironic, both because the star does the opposite of what she wants and because THAT’S MY LIFE.

Roald Dahl was the master of irony.  One of my favorite Dahl stories is “Parson’s Pleasure,” in which a crafty antiques dealer dresses as a clergyman and fakes people out of their treasures, then sells them for a handsome profit.  He gets the tables turned on him quite well.  Listen to Geoffrey Palmer read this classic Dahl tale here (in two parts).  It’s also in his story collection Kiss Kiss.

A person who likes sarcastic remarks will have a very different personality to someone who prefers slapstick or black humor.  The type of humor a person uses can reveal character.  If you are struggling to define a character in one of your works, try writing different scenes of him using different types of humor, or making a list of things she might find hilarious.   Your basic mean girl would laugh if her rival fell down the stairs, but a more gentle soul might prefer family-friendly puns, for example.

What’s your favorite kind of humor?  Funny movie or book you like the most?  Is there something you find funny that no one else does?

The Internet is a wonderful tool for writers, but it can also be a curse.  It’s got everything from craft to submission to research.  The trick is to winnow the good information from the chaff, and not get trapped for hours in a web of bad links.

I typed in “what to do about writer’s block”  and got a ton of advice.  But which website has the best information?  How to check its efficacy, especially if you are doing research?

#1

Is it a reputable site with clearly labeled credentials?

If you’re looking up crime information, start with the FBI’s website.  Why here?  The Federal Bureau of Investigation is one of the most well-known law enforcement agencies in the world.  Their reputation precedes them.

Any website that can’t or won’t tell you anything about who designed it or is running it probably isn’t worth your trust.   The FBI lets it all hang out.  They don’t hide their contact information.   They post serious publications.  And you can sign up for nifty email updates on law enforcement topics.

#2

Look at the URL – is the domain a .gov or .edu or .org?

.com is the usual domain for businesses.  If the site is selling something, chances are information you find there is for marketing purposes.   It might be good content, for example from a pest control company that has expertise in rodent elimination.  But information out of the scope of the organization may not be reliable.

.edu is a university or college, .gov is government, .mil military, and .org is organization, usually non-profit.

#3

Is the website well-designed, and is there a contact for the webmaster?

Visit some of the sites at Web Pages that Suck.  Would you trust the information you found on these?  How do you know it’s not faked by some troll from his mother’s basement?  Beware also of websites filled with ads.  There’s probably nothing there you need.

#4

Is the information verifiable and are there citations?  Is it recent?

You can double-check information across several different places.   Any publications posted should have Works Cited lists backed up by authoritative sources.  Academic publications are also subject to peer scrutiny, which verifies the solidity of research.  University students can get access to educational databases that contain lots of peer-reviewed papers and journal articles.  Check with the university library.

Any research older than five years from the current date may not be applicable, depending on the field of study.  Less than that and you’re probably okay.  Wikipedia is a good start, but because anyone can edit it, it’s not generally accepted as a source.  Check the links at the bottom of articles for something you can cite.

#5

How is the tone of the website?  Is it professional, or declamatory?  Does it come off as strident or hateful?

If you’re looking up effective cancer treatments, it’s probably safe to discount a website that tells you “An Amazon shaman invented this substance many years ago! Has cured everyone it touches!”  Others aren’t so easy.

An example one of my professors in college used was a professionally-designed website containing derogatory content about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  At first glance it appeared educational.  Reading it told a different story.   Although it was well-written, it dripped with bigotry.  It was hate speech masquerading as research.   Not acceptable source material, unless you were using it to illustrate racism.

#6

Does the website ask for any personal or financial information to access content?  If so, run away.

This is not the same as free registration to use a site.  And some subscription sites like Ancestry.com that perform a service are okay.  They will tell you exactly what you are getting and have privacy policies and contact information.

When in doubt, try Googling “[site name] scam” or “complaints.”  You may then evaluate the warnings and go from there.

Once you spend some time navigating around good ones like Mayo Clinic and How Stuff Works, you’ll get a feel for how a reputable website looks and smells.  Now the only other thing to avoid is wasting time surfing when you’re supposed to be writing.

Back to work!