The writing battles competition was so much fun and so informative for me that I’d like to make a habit out of writing shorter stories. The 1000 word limit gave me such a headache that I think it must be the way to go. It stretched my ability to create a lingering thread as well as compress that thread down into a bite-sized format. Working from a prompt also gave me a lot of inspiration to write something I normally wouldn’t. Comedy is a rare genre for me, and it took some serious effort to shake the rust off my brain. I wrote several bite-sized comedies during a phase of mine where I would respond to prompts from r/WritingPrompts, but it had been a long time, and none of those stories were particularly good either. I figure if I’m going to make a habit of these shorter stories, I should go back to responding to those prompts for the exercise. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get a great result out of one of them.

Also during my research phase for the competition, I came across a clip that I think saved my story. The prompt I received was to write a comedy with a character who was a habitual drinker, and to include a fossil in some way. What came out was a future news report featuring an archeologist who does a walkthrough of a recently unearthed site from the present day. The jokes grew from the archeologist making fun of our culture, and were all duds. Every last one. Even while writing I knew it wasn’t funny at all. While trying to figure out why, I remembered this clip from Bryan Cranston on the Hot Ones show that explains it perfectly:

Since everyone from interviewer to archeologist to reader was in on the joke, it just wasn’t funny. That first draft didn’t do much for me other than get the structure down. Needing a better way to deliver the punchlines, I tried what Cranston suggested, and made it so that the archeologist and the reporter interviewing him thought that they were investigating something absolutely serious. I kinda knew that’s the way it should have been all along anyway, but I was struggling to marry the humor to the serious characters. From their perspective, it was a one-in-a-billion find that might change their understanding of history as they knew it. How can that be funny? The answer is, it isn’t funny. Not to the characters anyway, and so it has to be funny to the reader somehow. Which was always the goal of course, but I was struggling to achieve that tastefully.

In the second draft I had the archeologist make a bunch of incredibly poor deductions about the site he was investigating. This let the reader feel in on the joke, but it didn’t really work either because it was so on the nose. Like any good story, I was looking to bring in some subtlety to make the reader feel good for piecing things together themselves. Plus, having the archeologist act like an idiot was in pretty poor taste. It turned the characters into fools. Rather than being a comedic story peppered with jokes, it was made up of nonsensical, uninteresting characters making silly statements. The story itself was a joke.

So I decided to make not only the archeologist, but also the reporter pretty smart. There are several moments where both of them make perfectly logical assumptions about what they’re seeing that the reader nevertheless knows are wrong. I think the biggest breakthrough I had was to not only make them intelligent, but also to imply that their whole society was full of deep thinkers, scientists, and philosophers. No longer fools at all, both characters became a lot more charismatic and likeable. They went from making fun of us to holding us in high esteem even when they shouldn’t be. Especially when they shouldn’t be. Their inclination to give us the benefit of the doubt at every turn came from a place of borderline naivete that makes us all look bad. They were intelligent enough to make complex deductions from the clues left around the site, but never cynical enough to realize what they were actually looking at. The story still makes fun of us, but not outright. Instead, the society analyzing our own is so much better that they can’t even fathom what we were getting up to nowadays. I think that central concept is pretty funny on its own, and a lot of the humor came naturally after making this adjustment.

For the ending I tried to turn it back around and give the archeologist some deep insights into our culture despite the fact that he had gotten most of the broad strokes very wrong. Ironically, he came full circle into understanding us pretty well. This rounded things out nicely, and though it’s hard for me to tell if the jokes landed as intended, I think the story works pretty well. Also, I had some help from friends to gauge the humor. They all seemed to think it was pretty funny. I don’t know if it’s of a caliber to win the competition, but I’m proud of it anyways. I’ll post it here once I get the results back either way. Maybe you guys will think it’s funny too.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley