Keep your hands where I can see them, and step away from the joke.

If Balls and Walnuts doesn’t seem particularly ballsy this week, and if the nuts just ain’t nutty enough for you, there’s a reason. Patients. Not all of them, mind you, but enough of them, nasty bitter evil people whose lives are not complete if they fail to ruin mine. Old-timers here will remember that I call these people brainsuckers: think vampires, minus the sex appeal. It only takes one a day to make me miserable, and this week it seems I’ve had three or four times that many.

But the week is over, I have a martini well in hand, and I’m ready to snark.

Karen is reading Christopher Paolini’s books. She finished Eragon and she’s maybe half way through the sequel, Eldest. At dinner tonight, she told me that Paolini’s writing improved slightly for the second book, but not by much. There are fewer whiffies and the descriptive passages are a bit better, but the characterization sucks. Also, he took a straightforward story (the first novel) and complicated it by adding two storylines — quite a juggling act even for an experienced author.

The books are nearly humorless. In Eldest, however, Paolini slips in a joke:

“Barges?” said the cobbler. “Barges? We don’t want no stinking barges!”

Puns are bad enough. Even Doug Adams and Terry Pratchett use puns sparingly, and they know how to fashion a pun: puns should never be casual; they should pain you like a dull knife. But to riff on Alfonso Bedoya’s much misquoted lines from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?

“Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!”

Damn. Everyone and their uncle has stolen this joke. I’ve stolen this joke*. It’s trite, Chris. It’s not a crime to edit trite things out of your novel. With a combined page length of 1165 pages, it’s not a crime to edit, period.

Yeah, yeah, I’m one to talk. But my stuff is tight. Or it will be, after I finish editing it.

Another gripe: this is a kid’s book. How many kids have watched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre? Or is Paolini counting on kids having heard this from their cartoons?

You can also wonder about the wisdom of putting any joke into an otherwise humor-free novel. You would, I think, run the risk of disrupting the mood and pulling the reader out of the story.

Humor is difficult. Few people do it well, and many do it poorly. Think about all the times you’ve seen humor backfire on blog and billboard comment threads. It’s very easy for readers to take your jokes the wrong way. Heaven knows it has happened to me more than once.

***

Despite the week sucking balls (as fiveandfour recently pointed out on this blog, “pinning it down to one specific animal’s balls kind of reduces the amount of suckage it actually entails”), I managed to figure a few things out about Book #2. Last weekend, I accomplished nothing. I had come to a point where my notes said, “Stuff happens between Characters A and B.” One of the flaws of the current manuscript is that A’s devotion to B (in Book #3) lacks an adequate foundation in Book #2. So: A and B have to do more Stuff Together. Hence last weekend’s writer’s block.

I hate padding. I’m sure I could edit James Clavell’s Shogun down to four hundred pages, maybe even three hundred. If I wasn’t so damned tired I could probably think of a few other examples of yeasty novels, but you’ll have to be satisfied with Shogun. Anyway, padding alone wouldn’t have been good enough. You can’t deepen a relationship between two characters with padding. Shit has to happen.

So, this week, I figured out my shit whilst driving to and from work. Then Karen and I discussed it over dinner tonight, and she made a few more good suggestions. Now A and B have some serious shit to discuss. Hoorah!

Okay. Time to figure out who won my contest.

D.

*I have an excuse. I was young (21) and dumb at the time. When I submitted my profile for a corporate newsletter, I wrote, “Hobbies? I don’t need no steenking hobbies!”