Week 4: Writer's Block

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The accursed writers block has struck. It was entirely unexpected, given my very productive Sunday afternoon, but it was bound to happen eventually. I started off very optimistic on Monday, ready to revamp one of my pieces, but it just wasn’t happening. For the rest of the week the same thing happened. I spent hours trying different formats, different POVs, and looking at other satirists for inspo but to little avail. 

On Wednesday I decided to just ditch the Rose Colored Glasses Ad I had been working on for a week. I liked the idea of it (critiquing leaders for making basing speeches on nostalgia/emotion rather than logic) but I didn’t feel it was snappy enough. On Thursday and Friday I looked through other ideas I had been ruminating on my rather lengthy Senior Project Master Doc. 

Some of them include:

1. Presidential Olympics (“Stealing Documents competition” etc.) 

2. Populist/Inflammatory Rhetoric New AP Lang Essay (“trump’s style has opened a new door of speech analysis for students”) 

3. SA Bill (Guards outside changing rooms in the name of protecting women) 

4. Oligarch Monopoly (Monopoly for finance bros) 

I drafted full pieces for Oligarch Monopoly and the SA Bill, but like with the Rose Colored Glasses Ad, I didn’t feel like the jokes were flowing well enough. Finally on Friday, I settled on my IVF satire piece (I’ll explain more later haha). I managed to get in that flow state as I was walking back home; I got down enough jokes, and felt happy with the narrative flow. I was exhausted on Friday, so didn’t write down more than an outline, but on Saturday I finished it. 

Satire’s Structure (What I learned) 

While this week wasn’t as productive as I wanted (I made little progress on my long work), it was actually really good for me to work through. Through all my failures I was able to build a clearer/more precise vision in my head of what I want my satire pieces to be, how they should flow etc. I know that I can trust my instincts; If I’m laughing while writing then it means other people will be too. If the topic is unmoored then that means it probably is. And I didn’t just learn more about audience perception of my pieces but the “academic” structure of them too. 

There are four main things to consider when writing satire (that I’ve picked up during my experimentation):

1. Format

2. Style/POV

3. External & Narrative Audience

4. Subject 

Format: How you structure the piece. Short story, advertisement, news article, facebook post, recipe, manifesto, radio transcript, email, love note etc. The list is long haha. But this is usually the basis of what type of humour you decide to go for. If I go the news-satire route, then I tend to be more understated, when I did a speech/manifesto I was a little more absurd/evil. 

(Note: different comedy sites prefer diff formats. So it’s necessary for me to switch it up)

Style/POV: Style refers to what type of satire you are going for. Juvenalian, Horation, Menippean etc. Basically are you going to be subtle in your jabs? Over the top? Do you switch between the two? POV is referring to your narrator in the piece. What is their role and personality and how does that come across in the writing. There can be multiple POVs depending on the format you choose.

Audience: This one can be tricky. External Audience is who, in the real world, you wish to digest your piece. Male/female, conservative/liberal, nationality, and education level are all important to consider. If you are trying to educate/import an opinion on your audience (which frankly everyone is) then you must keep in mind the beliefs of your external audience while writing. Narrative audience is just my term for who your narrator is speaking to. This needs to be consistent otherwise readers can lose track of the joke.  

Subject: What’s the point/focus of your piece. You can’t be too broad or too specific! If you want to educate people about an issue then you may need to pad it with references the audience is already cognizant of. ~70% of the piece should be directly related to your subject otherwise you lose narrative flow and the reader gets confused. 

(This has been the hardest for me to get down. Writing a max 700 word satire piece about a random politician no one’s heard of is pretttyyy tricky. So too is narrowing down a really interesting topic hehe) 

I hadn’t wanted to return to news satire so soon (ie. Trump goes to Kumon), but I had little time and it was a style I felt confident in. It’s entirely based off of Chief Justice Parker’s statement about the LePage Alabama ruling: “even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory”. I was immediately reminded of bio class and seeing how stage I and II fetuses (or zygotes can’t be sure) across a range of species look so similar. 

Thus, came “Alabama Supreme Court Justice IVF Opinion Proves Millenia Old Secret: God is a Rabbit”. 

Concluding thoughts 

I didn’t get what I wanted done this week, but I’m still ahead of my syllabus and have learned a lot of stuff :). Failure (I got my first rejection from McSweeney’s!) is an inevitable part of life and certainly so in the writing sphere. It’s something I need to get used to and learn how to view it as encouraging. I also did manage to churn out a whole story in a day and a half which is pretty alright!

Next week, I’m going to go back to researching (current/historical) as I think that helps me come up with fun ideas, as well as working on a structure for my longer piece. Thanks to my epic internal advisor, I am full with tons of ideas for silly blog posts so I hope to do that too. 

Tidbits of the Week:

– Back in the USSR by the Beatles (political satire, slight dig at the Beach Boys in the melody. Dichotomy of life…) 

– Bertrand Russel on fascism: “The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other”  (information & intimidation is key to power. Links to last week’s story) 

See you all and have a lovely evening!!

P.S. 

Realising all this has made it easier to write blog posts too. Sorry the initial ones were a lil word dumpy 🙂