It’s fitting that I’m writing about family from my mother’s house where I’m staying for a few weeks to help out. She is under hospice care after battling colon and lung cancer for the last two years.

Families are there for us when we encounter hardships and challenges. In real life this is great. In fiction, it’s problematic.

Children’s book writers put young characters in trouble and then let them solve it. Allowing an adult to solve a child’s story problem is a no-no. It squelches character growth (art imitates life) and young readers won’t be interested. What if the Mounties found Brian as soon as his plane went down in Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet?

Writers know that it’s a good idea to get the adults, especially parents, out of the picture--render them distracted, impaired or otherwise missing.  Or kill them off. A parent’s death can even be the challenge the character is facing, as in Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech.

Some of the loads of fictional orphans out there who spring to mind are Harry Potter, Gilly Hopkins, Sara Crewe in A Little Princess, Mary in The Secret Garden. Maniac Magee, Corinna in The Folk Keeper, the four siblings in Dicey’s Song, and Cinderella, of course. Even in Good Night Moon, there are no parents—in the story anyway. Just a quiet old lady who appears to be some sort of temp.

Many more children’s characters live with only one adult: siblings in Little Women, Sarah, Plain and Tall, and The Penderwicks; protagonists in When You Reach Me, What Jamie Saw, One Crazy Summer, and the Joey Pigza books, to name a few.

Fictional children do of course have intact families and involved adults.  As a fourth-grader, I loved The Little House on the Prairie series where Ma and Pa and the kids worked so hard they made me long to chop wood or boil some clothes. Charlie in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had loads of family, and they all loved and believed in Charlie. Their problem was being desperately poor and about to perish, as the four grandparents in one bed aptly illustrated.  More recently, the challenge of having an autistic member within a traditional nuclear family came alive for me in Cynthia Lord’s Rules. And Sophie Hartley, from the eponymous series by our own Stephanie Greene, has a wonderful family and still has plenty of problems to solve, including her relationships with her family.

So my real-life family is facing a challenge—the final days of our mother’s life, although happily my siblings and I are long past childhood. And like a good book, it is a journey, filled with tears and laughter, and the remarkable process of letting go. The last few evenings, Mom takes her morphine, I have a generous glass of Chardonnay, and we watch a couple of episodes of Modern Family from the DVD my cousin delivered. I admire the writing and the deft blend of humor and poignancy in this series. Mom and I laugh because we recognize ourselves and our extended family that is a mishmash of young and old, rich and poor, gay and straight, able and disabled, Republicans and Democrats, Religious and non, Blue and Red State residents. We’re nothing if not fodder for good comedy.

Because of the pain medication she is taking and also because of the disease itself, Mom’s losing short-term memory, word recall, and sadly, now reading. She taught my three siblings and me to love books from an early age, reading aloud to us such books as E.B White, Dr. Seuss, Margaret Wise Brown, Karla Kuskin, and Maurice Sendak.  She reports that now The Dallas Morning News looks like it’s printed in a foreign alphabet. As we have always done, my brothers, sister and I joke around with her, presently by breaking into charades when she is frustrated in recalling a word. Then she cracks up. It’s also fitting that I can now read to her; from the paper, her beloved mysteries, emails and cards from friends, a manuscript of mine (she’s always been my best audience), and I hope soon to read her some of the wonderful spiritual readings from www.hospice.org.

I’m grateful that I can be a part of my mom’s last stage of life, a challenge and joy for us both. We’ve returned to our easy familiarity and occasional sniping, the memories we share, the hardships we’ve been through, the many laughs we’ve had, and now our reversal of roles. This is what family is for.

http://www.readerkidz.com/

This is a charming historical novel about mice, and that’s a phrase I’ve never written before. It stars mice siblings, in fact, and the oldest sister Helena, like every good eldest sister, is in charge and naturally, the narrator. Most of the story takes place during a trans-Atlantic crossing aboard a great ocean liner due to reach England in time for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897.  It’s a mice-tale of manners, a swirl of romance and royalty, ball gowns, weddings and many coursed-meals, whether with humans at the Captain’s table or at the mice’s yardstick table on thread spool seats.

The mice siblings live with the wealthy, but comic and all-too-human Cranston family who are headed for London to find suitable matches for their two daughters.  Mrs. Cranston in particular says all the wrong things with, as described by one passenger, “a voice like the cawing of a crow,” displaying “shoulders like sides of beef.” The mice sisters, Helena, Beatrice and Louise, and their pesky brother Lamont, all hate water, but accompany their human family tucked away in their steamer trunks.  They find the ship teeming with a hierarchy of all classes of mice also accompanying their human passengers, and of course, a ship’s cat. Helena and her siblings work feverishly behind the scenes, relying on every rodent social connection they can muster to compensate for the clumsy Cranstons, and match-make for the deserving Cranston girls. They are aided by, among others, Nigel the Mouse Steward, the old Duchess of Cheddar Gorge who has “terrible teeth and breath that would kill flies,” and dashing Lord Peter, Mouse Equerry.

To the reader’s happy satisfaction, mice and humans both find plenty of romance and adventure at sea. Best of all, Peck’s trademark dry humor and sly sense of fun are in full play on every page of SECRETS AT SEA.

 One definition says humor occurs when two different frames of reference are set up—the more incongruent, the better—and a collision is engineered between them.

 As my nineteen year-old daughter can attest from a recent fender-bender, a collision is usually a surprise.

Remember that laughter is simply the release of tension. Dark reality (truth), incongruity, absurdity, all make us feel uneasy or tense.  A surprise coupled with this, releases that tension.

 Let’s back up a moment: The brain reacts in one of two ways when it is surprised. Delight or fear.  If the atmosphere around the unexpected event is threatening, we’re moved to fear, and a fight or flight impulse. 

 Remember when Coraline goes through the door in the wall into the duplex of the “other mother and father”? By use of weird and menacing details, Neil Gaiman sets up a scary atmosphere. When the “other mother” turns around, Coraline is shocked to see that she has big black buttons for eyes.  Buttons are not especially dangerous or threatening things, but this surprise is creepy as heck.

 We laugh, though, at something unexpected if the atmosphere is non-threatening, or in the case of The Wee Free Men: The Beginning by Terry Pratchett, if the atmosphere is wildly absurd, despite being threatening:

 Twelve year-old Tiffany Aching, a witch in training, is being pursued by a headless horseman without any eyes. Now that certainly is threatening. But one of the six inch-tall, blue tattooed, red haired, kilt-wearing, Nac Mac Feegle drops out of a tree to help her out. He lands between the horse’s ears, yelling,  “Here’s a face full o’ dandruff for ye, yer bogle, courtesy of Big Yan!” and then head butts the poor animal between the eyes, The horse staggers, and Big Yan repeats the process: “Big toughie, is ye? Once more wi’ feelin’!” The horse and presumably his confused headless rider, collapse in the snow.

A six inch-tall, tattooed blue pixie (in a kilt) that can fell a horse with a head butt is entirely unexpected. What was dark and threatening became absurd and hilarious. And wait until you hear about their drinkin’ and fightin’ and stealin’!

 So, to review: A writer introduces an idea or subject, the more weighty, dark and emotional, usually the better. A headless horseman works fine.

 Then we turn it on its, um, head by pairing the former with something totally incongruous—the two would not normally be associated in the same thought. The Nac Mac Feegle would not be associated by most people with anything, normally. It’s an unexpected pairing, and we’re surprised.  We laugh.

Next: How writers can increase the humor in their fiction

The Director of Library Services at Town School for Boys (K-8) knows what her students love to read.

I try to write humor, among other things, for young readers. I did a thesis on “Surprise” which is the big daddy of humor, and so studied funny kid lit stuff like CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS for months. It was a blast. I continue to ponder how it works and doesn’t, and how to create it. Here’s what I’ve learned.

1. The funniest thing of all about humor is that it is powered by unpleasant truth, cruelty, darkness, fear, despair and shock. Put that in your pipe.

Carol Burnett said, “Comedy is pain plus time.”

According to E.B. White, “Humor plays close to the big hot fire which is the truth, and the reader feels the heat.”

And Mark Twain said, poignantly, “The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven.”

2.  Therefore, it’s downright ironic that it’s dismissed as light and frivolous.

3. Humor’s pretty black and white: either it works and we laugh, or at least smile, or it fails. Often miserably.

Football coaching legend Lou Holtz said, “The problem with having a sense of humor is that often the people you use it on aren't in a very good mood.”

4. Humor is fragile: It’s entirely subjective, so therefore not only cultural, but influenced by maturity, intelligence, education and context. It can be transitory and ephemeral and is often untranslatable (and I’m not even talking about languages).

One man’s guffaw is another woman’s groan and a third person’s confused blink. 

An agent posted on her website, “Don’t submit humor that’s not funny.”

My response would be to advise her to watch the same comedy on a Saturday night with beer and friends as opposed to by herself. Maybe we could submit our humor to this agent with a beer.

5. It’s hard. If you’ve ever tried it, in any form, you know humor is hard to do at all, let alone well.

6. Humor is risky. See 3, 4, and 5.

7. In literature, film, and theater, humor tends to be undervalued critically, with a few exceptions such as the SCBWI Sid Fleischman award,  Lambda Literary Award for Humor,  and the Canadian Leacock Medal for Humour. Readers and audiences love it and will pay handsomely for it. But critics tend to be more dismissive. Mel Gilden, a TV and adult and children’s fiction writer said, “Look at any list of arts awards… Pulitzers, Newberys, Nebulas, Edgars, any list you like. You'll see that most of the award winners are serious dramatic tours-de-force about the human spirit in conflict with great adversity. Humor, on the other hand, is thought to be trivial. If it's funny, it can't be important.”  See number 2, the irony of being dismissed as frivolous.

8. Screenwriter guru Robert McKee calls comedy “The Angry Art.” He says it springs from a mindset that sees humans and our behavior as absurd and assumes that we will inevitably screw things up. This world view is in contrast with the dramatist’s, who admires and respects human behavior and believes that “even under the best of circumstances, humans are noble and magnificent creatures.” Now that’s kind of funny.

Humor is such a wonderful thing, helping you realize what a fool you are but how beautiful that is at the same time.

Lynda Barry

9. Humor really is the best medicine. Academics continue to probe its powerful healing effects. Gelotology is the study of the effects of laughter on the body. (They’re good.) Did you know there is laughter yoga? And not surprisingly, there is humor and laughter therapy, where it’s paramount that the therapist laugh with the patient and not at the patient.

10. Humor is Grace. It keeps the world sane. Humor allows us to look straight into the darkness and deflect it with a snort.

11. Last and definitely not least, it may just save the world. See number 9 and 10 .

In prehistoric times, mankind often had only two choices in crisis situations: fight or flee. In modern times, humor offers us a third alternative; fight, flee - or laugh.  Robert Orben 

Next: Surprise! How Humor Works