Question about refining your work.

You can have others read it, or put it aside for a few days and come back to it as just a reader, see if it amuses you, then edit more if you think it needs it. . .

You can also post it in Share Your Work and let us know it's there, so we can go over and tell you if it's funny or not.

Well, I know there are new folks, myself included, who haven't seen the original, so I'd say give it a whirl. Even if someone can remember the older version, none of us will have it in our minds like you do, and so can probably be a lot more objective.

As a rule of thumb, I post on SYW --if I get traffic, I take it that it is funny, if I don't, I declare it a dud. I also sometimes ask specific people in the AW community to crit my pieces.

I can read my stuff for the 50th time and still crack myself up. I'm just that good.

Actually, that's not true, but I can still see where the joke is and if I'm satisfied with it or not.

Sherry, do you let us know when it's up there? I don't cruise the SYW forum, so I wouldn't just go there unless someone on a thread I was active on said, "hey, this is up there".

I admit I'm bad about letting people know, I myself am addicted to SYW and look for lonley posts. I'll let people know I submitted in the thread at the beginning, --if you are interested, my two latest in Humor are Ateams and Bteams and Goodalls in Our Midst

kikazaru said:

- how do you even tell if what you've done has made it better or worse since no matter how funny it initially was, you can't possibly laugh after about the 17th rewrite?

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I can only read my stuff 16 times and laugh, after that, I have to read it to someone else. If they laugh, it becomes funny again.

I'm with RG...uh, I always find my stuff funny. If I can't re-read it and find it amusing for the 20th time, then I have to check that my jokes aren't stale or dated.

I can re-read Robert Benchley and Dave Barry over and over again and still laugh at their pieces. I figure if I can't do that with my own, then they aren't good enough to go out.

But everyone's mileage my vary.

I have this same problem with my comics. A comic's punchline is only funny to stare at for a few seconds, so the two hours it takes to ink, scan, and edit a comic strip will suck all the funny right out of it.

One of the biggest benefits that I've gotten from this site is the feedback in the SYW section. Not just for specific crits, but for general interest in any given story. I email first drafts of all my stories (I write about two a week) to a growing list of friends, family, and friends-of-friends, etc. Some stories get zero responses, and some flood my inbox with LOLs, and it gives me an idea of how much people like it.

If you have a RL friend or somebody on the site here whose work (or humor in person) you particularly like, they probably click on your humor level and would be a good judge of your work. They would be a great sounding board.

My last little nugget of advice on self-judging is to get away from it for a little bit. Write some humor, read some humor, come back to it later. A fresh look might even kick it up a notch.

I used to worry greatly about that, too. But, as I progressed in my writing, I found I had more confidence in my writing and learned to trust that initial judgement, that no matter how many rewrites, if I found it funny during creation then it will likely still be funny when refined.

So, my take would be don't worry about it, if you found your writing funny at the first instant, don't worry that it may now seem stale to you.

steve

"I don't care who you are, that there's funny."