How to Write Romantic Comedy Read online

  While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

  HOW TO WRITE ROMANTIC COMEDY

  First edition. May 9, 2019.

  Copyright © 2019 Rhoda Baxter and Jane Lovering.

  Written by Rhoda Baxter and Jane Lovering.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Writing Romantic Comedy

  Chapter 1: What’s so funny about love?

  Chapter 2: The Comic Premise

  Chapter 3: The different types of comedy

  Chapter 4: Uses of Comedy

  Chapter 5: Different types of jokes

  Chapter 6: Tools to make things funnier

  Chapter 7: Timing

  Chapter 8: Writing the rom com - things to remember

  Chapter 9: Marketing a funny book

  Chapter 10: Conclusions

  Bonus section: The basics of story writing

  Writing Romantic Comedy

  by Jane Lovering and Rhoda Baxter

  Chapter 1: What’s so funny about love?

  Laughter is a great thing – it lifts your mood, burns calories, helps reduce pain [1]and reduces your blood pressure in the long run. And everyone loves a good love story. So if you can combine the two, you’ve got to be onto a winner... right?

  Romantic comedy (or rom com) is a hugely popular genre. At its very basic level, it’s a romance, with funny bits. It’s easier if you think about films rather than books because the mish mash of marketing terms that have been used for romance novels with comedy in have muddied the waters somewhat. You have a girl or a boy (or a non-binary person) meets a boy or a girl (or a non-binary person), they are usually in some sort of conflict, they flirt a bit, they realise they’re falling in love, they may even get together, then things go horribly wrong, they overcome whatever it was that was holding them back and finally, finally, they get a happy ending.

  For it to be a romance, you must have a happy ending. It doesn’t have to be ‘Happy Ever After’, Happy For Now will do. If you don’t have a happy ending, my friend, you have not written a romance.

  For it to be a comedy, it has to be funny. That’s where this book comes in.

  Different types of romantic comedy

  We’re going to call it rom com from now on, because, frankly, who has the time for ‘antic’ and ‘omedy’. They don’t even rhyme. We’ll leave them here to amuse themselves for a while.

  Where were we... oh yes. Here are few examples of rom coms. This list is here to give you an idea of the breadth of the genre.

  TL;DR - If it’s got romance and comedy in it... you can probably call it a rom com.

  Bridget Jones’ Diary by Helen Fielding- the book that sparked the flame of chicklit. It’s an epistolary retelling of Pride and Prejudice, written in the form of a diary. It hit the zeitgeist of the early 90s and millions of young women identified with the main character.

  The Secret Dream World of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella - the successor to Bridget Jones. A story about a compulsive shopper who somehow ends up writing a financial advice column. This is the book that embodied the ditsy, accident prone, designer shoe obsessed heroine that became synonymous with Chicklit. Unusually for a chicklit heroine, Becky Bloomberg (the Shopaholic) went on to star in a whole series of books.

  Living Dangerously - the first book by Katie Fforde, who went on to be one of the best known romance writers in the UK. Katie’s books have lovely Cotswold settings and have a very comforting air about them, even when they tackle serious subjects. These are probably veering closer to light (as in ‘not dark’) women’s fiction

  Afternoon Tea at the Sunflower Cafe by Milly Johnson - This is Rhoda’s favourite by this author - who is another star of the UK rom com charts. Her books are regional romantic comedies. The books are heartwarming and funny and excellent reads wherever you’re from, but if you know the region (Yorkshire) they are even funnier because you recognise the quirks that people have.

  I don’t Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson - a very popular book book about a woman juggling marriage, career and motherhood. The first book to become popular which had a heroine who was older (in her thirties - gasp!). It is also more about keeping love alive than falling in love itself, so it’s technically not a rom com, but gets classed as one anyway. It hit the zeitgeist in the late 90s/early 2000s and millions of young mums identified with it (possibly the same ones who identified with Bridget Jones when they were younger...).

  To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han - trope driven YA rom com. Notable in that it is a book about a half Korean heroine, written by a Korean author. It’s so much fun. Also notable because it got turned into a film by Netflix and everyone was talking about it for a while.

  Shaun of the Dead - okay, not a book. It’s a film. It’s mentioned here because it’s a zom rom com and you don’t get many of those.

  Rachel’s Holiday by Marian Keyes - this is one of those books that modern rom com authors cite as ‘the book that made me want to write’. It’s about addiction and is dark and deeply moving, but also has jokes in it. This is what Jane and Rhoda both like to write. :-)

  Chapter 2: The Comic Premise

  Laughter is the way we react to a joke. It’s a very old response, wired deep into our animal brains. No matter what language we speak, we all laugh. [2] It’s a social signal to say ‘I’m all right’, it’s a way to show we belong to part of a group, it’s an exercise in power, it’s all of these things and more.

  Laughing is a social activity. We laugh more, louder when we’re with other people. Sometimes, if someone’s giggle is contagious enough, we will all laugh when there’s no joke at all. But reading is a solitary activity. As writers, we can’t really replicate the social side of things, but we can use humour to produce laughter. If we’re really lucky, we get readers complaining that they laughed out loud on the bus and got funny looks.

  One popular theory is that laughter is a modified fear response. When we perceive a threat, our body responds, putting us into a heightened state of tension. If that threat is suddenly removed, the drop in tension released a burst of endorphins, and we laugh.

  When we tell a joke, we are trying to replicate this in the mind of the reader (or listener).

  Every joke has at least two components - the set up and the punchline. The set up is where the joker (not The Joker, he’s creepy, I mean the person telling a joke; that joker) builds the scenario, leading you towards one conclusion. Tension builds in your mind as you work out what’s changed. Tension builds up in your minds and body as you anticipate where the story is going to go and predict ending to the story. You lean in. And then ... BAM! The punchline subverts the expected ending. It switches track and takes the story an entirely different direction. There is a split second where your brain analyses the information you’ve just had and realises that it still applies to the new situation introduced by the punchline. The difference between what you expect and what you get makes you laugh. Pleasure centres are stimulated and you get that lovely little endorphin hit. A little like you’ve escaped from danger.

  Generally speaking, the higher the tension before the punchline, the bigger the ‘relief’ and the bigger the laugh.

  This would be why people working in stressful situations - medics, rescue workers and the like - use jokes, often with very dark humour, to alleviate the tension. It’s a pressure release valve.

  As writers we can use this to puncture the tension in a scene - either because the characters needed it, or because you want to release a tiny bit of pressure s
o that you can build it up again in the next scene.

  So how do you create this gap between what is expected and what is delivered?

  There are lots of ways to describe it - the comic premise, the expectation gap, the incongruity gap - but we like to call it Juxtaposition of Thingies. We came up with that after careful thought, obviously ... not because we both had a moment of brain fog and couldn’t remember actual words. Nope. Not at all.

  Humour comes from the gap between what you expect and what actually happens. Generally speaking, the bigger the gap, the funnier it is. But if the gap is too big, people may not make the jump.

  So how to do you create the gap? Easy. Juxtapose things.

  How to juxtapose your thingies

  1.Mismatched characters - juxtapose personalities

  This is the basis of every odd couple scenario you’ve ever seen, including the brilliantly titled The Odd Couple.

  The difference between how the different characters react to the same situation, leads to all kinds of amusing scenarios. Ideally you need at least one character that the audience can identify with. It doesn’t have to be the same character right the way through, but each scene needs one who represents the ‘normal’ interpretation.

  You can have an odd character in a normal world - Mork and Mindy is a great example of this. Mork is an alien and doesn’t respond to anything in the way you’d expect. Similarly, Mr Bean is funny because whatever he does, it’s not what you’d expect a normal person to do in that situation. Mr Bean’s situations are in themselves a little odd and generally the scenarios are simple and easy to understand, which makes the show appealing to young children and adults alike. Johnny English, on the other hand, is even funnier because the gap isn’t just between what you’d expect him to do and what he actually does... but also between how he sees himself and how he actually is (see Dramatic Irony in the next chapter).

  Another option is to have one sane character in an odd world. Penny in the early series of The Big Bang Theory is a normal person surrounded by oddball geniuses. Tim in the UK version of The Office is another ‘normal’ person who has to deal with working in a team of odd personalities. Penny and Tim’s reactions to what is going on around them represents the viewer and what they would expect and provides a built-in contrast to the wackiness of the other characters.

  Do you really need to have a ‘normal’ person in the show? Not necessarily. A group of extreme or unusual characters can be hilarious - like Red Dwarf or The IT Crowd. But in each of these, in any given situation, one of the characters will advocate the ‘normal’ solution. They pass the baton between them, creating the feeling of an ensemble of oddballs.

  Probably the most useful method of creating the expectation gap when it comes to writing the rom com is to have a few instances of someone doing something weird in response to an otherwise normal situation. For example, Sophie Kinsella’s How to Be an Undomestic Goddess begins with the heroine trying to get a job as a housekeeper simply because she refuses to believe she might NOT get the job. Once she gets offered the job, her stubborness means she has to keep going to ‘prove’ she can do it. This fierce competitive streak is entirely in keeping with the character. She doesn’t step outside her normal self to do something weird. It’s all properly foreshadowed, so that when we see her do something strange, while we cover our eyes and say ‘noooo’, we also understand why she did it.

  2. Comic characters - Juxtapose worldviews

  A comic character (or even a group of them) has a unique view of the world which governs how they behave. Eg. Father Ted, Blackadder, Toast of London, The Big Bang Theory. [If you haven’t seen any of these comedies (let’s skip over the bit where we stare at you with faintly horrified expressions) we suggest you rush off and do so as soon as you finish reading this book, and making notes. You are making notes, right?]

  In romance we don’t often use comic characters as heroines (with the honorable exception of Becky Bloomberg in the shopaholic series) because we need them to be relatable. There was a time when the clumsy heroine was popular, but now they’re likely to be branded too stupid to live and taken outside and shot ... or the reader just gives up in annoyance, which amounts to the same thing (what do you mean ‘not really’?)

  But there’s no reason you can’t use them as secondary characters. The wacky best friend is an often used trope. As we’ve said before though, be careful not to make them two dimensional. They need to be real people, even if they have odd ideas about what’s normal.

  Similarly, you can create humour in the gap between what a character says and what they actually do. Becky Bloomberg is a good example (again! It has all the good stuff, does Shopaholic).

  3. Fish out of water - Juxtapose situations against character reactions

  This is another common trope - the big city lawyer goes to work as a housekeeper (How to be an Undomestic Goddess), city girl inherits a share in a auctioneering house (Katie Fforde’s Flora’s Lot) just about anyone opens a cup cake shop. The difference between how the heroine’s expectations and how things are actually done in the new place are full of comedic potential.

  Probably the most useful method of creating a comic situation when it comes to writing the rom com is to have a few instances of someone doing something weird in response to an otherwise normal situation. This provides the way to set up the situation. Then make things worse - but always, always, make sure the characters are true to themselves.

  This is closely related to the comic characters. You can surround your ‘normal’ heroine with outlandish characters. Better still, put them into conflict with other normal people and see if you can pull comedy out of that.

  4. Absurd Humour - Juxtapose... well... anything

  There is a time and place for absurdity and to be honest, a rom com is probably the wrong place for it. You can have the odd spark of absurdity, maybe in someone’s reaction to something, or in dialogue, but really, it’s hard to sustain it over the course of whole book. That’s why a lot of absurd humour is sketch based. You can’t stretch it out without adding other comedic elements.

  Monty Python’s Flying Circus was great at absurd humour. The associated films combined satire with elements of the absurd to great effect. Similarly, The Mighty Boosh, which combined brilliant comic characters and hints of the absurd with traditional sit-com storylines. I’m trying to think of an American example... er... Pee Wee Herman, perhaps.

  5 Dramatic irony - Juxtapose what the character knows against what they think they know

  This is where the audience know more than the characters. This is a great device for creating tension (because the reader knows that the person the heroine is about to fall for is a baddie – but the heroine doesn’t!). You can also use it for comedy. The Back to the Future movies (and a lot of time travel stories) use dramatic irony for comedy because the main character and the audience know what the future holds, whilst the rest of the characters in the past don’t. So when Marty tells Doc that the president in his time in the future is Ronald Reagan (at that point in the past, he was just an actor), Doc finds it funny. The audience finds it funnier because it’s actually true.

  You can have dramatic irony in the gap between how the character predicts things are going to be and how they actually end up (for example, Bridget Jones predicts that she’ll look sophisticated and smooth on her weekend away in the posh hotel, but in reality, she ends up wind blown and missing half the things she needs).

  You can also make the gap through the difference between how the character sees themselves and how they appear to the reader. For example Basil Fawlty (in Fawlty Towers), Johnny English, Bertie Wooster and oh, so many more. If you want an old school example, Mr Pickwick of The Pickwick Papers.

  In real life, this is why we find a lot of things kids say to be cute and funny. Things they believe to be true are, sadly, not really true. As adults we know this and find it funny. It’s a pity really. Some of the stuff they believe is fantastic. Except, maybe, the dragons. br />
  6. Schadenfreude - not really a juxtaposition

  This is where you see something terrible happen to someone else and you laugh because you’re so relieved that it’s not you. It relies on the reader laughing at a character rather than laughing with them. Once you get beyond the slipping on banana skins or falling face first into a cake type gags, it borders on being cruel. Use sparingly. If at all.

  All this boils down to juxtaposing one thing against another. When we first gave this talk, Jane presented wearing a penguin onesie. Now, there’s nothing funny about a onesie. Or about J- ... er ... a woman giving a presentation. But someone standing in front of a room giving a serious presentation, whilst dressed as a penguin. That’s funny because it’s unexpected.

  So get your thingies. Juxtapose them in unexpected ways and et voila - the funny.

  Chapter 3: The different types of comedy

  We’ve decided (or maybe the powers that be have decided, I can’t remember), that there are seven different types of comedy. Some of them work better in a written format than others (just try writing down someone slipping on a banana skin – it’s not funny at all as a series of words. There are those who would argue it’s not funny as a visual gag either, but those people usually are usually in charge of Health and Safety, and will point out that nobody should be eating in the workplace and her shoes are unsuitable for heavy lifting, so we can disregard them).

  Anyway. On to the types of comedy that we have decided on. And do bear in mind that most of these subsections of comedy have a huge amount of cross-over between them.

  1. Observational Comedy

  Observational comedy is generally that of the ‘quiet wit’ rather than the hysterical laughter, but it works well in written form. It’s the throwaway line when your couple meet and she describes his hair as being like a Brillo pad that two dogs have had a fight over. It’s best described as a new way of looking at an old scene, a new way of putting something everyday into words. It’s the humour of the really good stand up comedian who can riff on the subject of, say, conversations on the bus, or the ridiculousness of clouds for an hour and the fact that you can listen (or read) and have a reaction of “gosh, I never thought of it like that, but – yes!” is what makes it funny.