One of my biggest and boldest moments as a writer occurred when I was 21 and attended a professional writers workshop at the St. Marks Church in Greenwich Village (ok, the Lower East Side) run by the beat writer Seymour Krim and containing lots of published writers.
My short story was read to the assemblage and drew howls of laughter. I thought I'd become a made man on the spot that night.
Until the critiques. The battle raged between those who thought the story was too serious to be funny and those who thought it was too funny to be serious, with me on the sidelines like a judge at a tennis match.
In one way or another that problem has dogged my writing efforts ever since, through 30 years and thirteen published books.
I'm working on a new novel right now, 2nd chapter. It was a comedy, I thought. Then I decided to kill off someone's son. If you do that, my wife said, it's no longer a comedy. And if it remains a comedy after that, I'd probably stop reading. So I decided to save the son's life.
But how do I write a comedy and yet have someone get killed?
My short story was read to the assemblage and drew howls of laughter. I thought I'd become a made man on the spot that night.
Until the critiques. The battle raged between those who thought the story was too serious to be funny and those who thought it was too funny to be serious, with me on the sidelines like a judge at a tennis match.
In one way or another that problem has dogged my writing efforts ever since, through 30 years and thirteen published books.
I'm working on a new novel right now, 2nd chapter. It was a comedy, I thought. Then I decided to kill off someone's son. If you do that, my wife said, it's no longer a comedy. And if it remains a comedy after that, I'd probably stop reading. So I decided to save the son's life.
But how do I write a comedy and yet have someone get killed?
