Funny Bunny

 The Hound asked: Have you ever really had FUN writing a scene (or scenes)?

I always have fun writing.

That isn’t to say that all of my scenes are funny, often quite the contrary. My writings deal with some serious subjects, sometimes real, sometimes imaginary, and sometimes a combination of both. However, like most people who write, I feel compelled to write, and fulfilling that is about as close to happy as life gets for me.

Not that I haven’t agonized over rewrites. Cutting writing for editors is not particularly fun and generally, I don’t do much of it. “Please take another look” will often get an editor to take that other look and the cutting is less painful, if indeed, they still find it necessary.

My favorite scenes are those where, as insane as it may sound to the non-writer, the characters take over and I have to try to keep up with the conversations. That is where most of the humor in my stories comes through.
I think that I have more fun with dialogue when not writing in rhyme, which I do very little of anymore.

I used to wonder where in Heaven’s name my favorite authors came up with characters, ones so contrary to the writer’s life, and how those characters stayed in character. I still don’t know, but I know the characters simply come to life and can take over the work.

When asked if the scenes were ‘fun’ to write, I chose not to add an excerpt of what I may consider my ‘funniest’. I am not sure if my funniest scenes are:

1) the banter of  the angel and the cat  who were in combination, (which I mentioned in the post “Legacy”  last month) or
2) the couple who are on a second honeymoon on an island and their silly argument that starts over nothing, or when they find that the building they keep being drawn to is not only not abandoned, people that they know have seen them on security cameras.

As a poet at heart, the rhyming children’s Christmas book which I have written was a great deal of fun to do. It was based on Granddaughter #1’s close friend, her stuffed Lambie, who was a member of the family when she was little. (Actually, we still refer to him as a person.)
He used to have adventures and had to be rescued; I drove him home more than once at night, or her dad had to pick him up at restaurants, etc. Even though she is a high school senior, Lambie still stays in Granddaughter #1’s bedroom but lives a very quiet life now.

One Christmas week she panicked because, despite all precautions to keep him from getting lost (again), he could not be found, and I realized after some years that it would make a great story.

Here is an excerpt from it:

One Christmastime, Mom called on the phone,
“Grandma, did Lambie stay at your home?
We’ve looked everywhere as hard as we might,
But we haven’t seen Lambie since Saturday night.”

“We looked in the kitchen and looked in the hall,
We looked behind dressers, between the bed and the wall.
We looked under everything where a Lambie might fall,
We looked inside cupboards, but there’s no sign at all.”

Grandma called family and friends to see
If they could think of where Lambie might be.
They said, “Look under tables and all over the floor;
Look inside of closets and behind every door.
Look on the shelves and inside every drawer.”
But they started to think they’d see Lambie no more.

As you can imagine, Lambie was found, where he was found is the whole point, (and the end), of the story.

I submitted this story in its entirety to one high-end children’s publication. My luck, I found out later that it no longer publishes rhyming works.
I need to get myself in gear and get this out more. It is long enough for a book.

I can’t put my finger on a photo of them, but below is a self-portrait with Lambie, done when she was about four years old:

(Yes, it is in a frame and hangs in our hallway.)

Dialogue is my favorite thing to write, and where the humor is in my works, but setting scenes, imagining places, describing settings, none of these are too hard and even if it is sometimes work, I enjoy it, or I would not do it.

I find life to be stressful and I find writing to take me from the stress. If I found writing to be less than fun, I would not do it, so yes,I have fun all the time when writing.

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