Required reading for humor writers

Stephen Leacock

Writing tips from John Berendt

Berendt said: "When I'm writing, I like to gain distance from my work so I can tell how it will strike a reader who is seeing it for the first time. I do this through a trick I devised while I was living in Savannah writing Midnight — I would call my apartment in New York, the answering machine would pick up, I'd read the page of text I'd just written, then I'd hang up. A minute later, I'd call my apartment again and listen to the "message." Hearing my own voice reading the page over the phone — my voice having traveled 1,800 miles (900 each way ) — gave me just the detached perspective I needed."

His advice to aspiring writers:
"Keep a diary, but don't just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end — as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It's great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary."

From Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac http://www.elabs7.com/functions/message_view.html?mid=1132854&mlid=499&siteid=20130&uid=4087b6131e