Well, mostly online, nowadays, but still, the original source for the best material is always real life, real situations which someone has had the presence of mind to write down for the enjoyment of all posterity.

So don’t worry if you can’t shazam a funny scene out of thin air, it doesn’t mean your sense of humor is clinically dead. All you need are some real life examples. And, speaking of clinics, here are some notes found in real hospitals, which ought to tickle your funny bone, and maybe inspire some hilarious dialogue for your stories.

1- Well then it can’t be THAT bad, can it?

Click the page numbers to go on reading.

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Yes, I know there’s a “create page” button right there, silly. That is not the problem. The problem is you, or rather your perception of yourself.

Bear with me for a couple of paragraphs.

Have you ever listened to your own recorded voice? It’s a weird experience. Most people will not recognize their own voice and a good majority will outright hate it. That’s because you are not used to hearing your voice with your ears. What you hear is mostly the vibration going directly to your eardrums after traveling around your skull and, in my case, picking up echoes of vast, empty spaces within…

The same happens with more or less everything else about us. We know who we are, but we don’t have the objective, sensory perception others will have of us. That is the main issue when you set off to create yourFacebook page. It should not be a personal page, it should represent your author persona as you wish it to be perceived by others. In order to do so, even before you click that “create page” button, you need to go through a couple of preliminary steps:

Find your brand

What are you all about in your books? Do you feel like you’re continuing the work of a famous author of the past? Are you creating something entirely new? What makes it unique? Do you identify with one of your characters?

The answers to those questions will help you begin to define your brand. The final result can be as simple as getting an author photo dressed as a steampunk vampire or merely adding a tagline, like “Sci-fi, fantasy, fortuitous humor”.  I chose the latter after trying the vampire thingy and deciding it sucked.

The more time you dedicate to defining and perfecting your brand, the easier it will be for you to come up with your image, the combination of logo, color palette and message you want to convey through your Facebook page. This step can be a toughie, so it’s recommended that you proceed to step two:

Find successful similar brands and study them.

Unless you’ve invented a whole new genre, you can safely assume there are other author pages out there which you can check out and draw inspiration from. Do you write noir thrillers? Mark Dawson’s FB page might put you on the right track.  Maybe you’re into historical fiction with a Christian twist, in which case Author J.B. Richards has a page you may want to explore. Do you write science fiction and fantasy mysteries with unexpected humor? don’t even think of hijacking my style because I will cut you. Nah, just kidding. You can check me out too.

Create your brand material

All right. You’ve figured out what you’re all about. You know how you want to appear before your readers. If you can dabble with computer graphics you can probably conk out a decent logo and a convincing Facebook page banner. It’s best if you get someone else to check your work out and, in case, suggest you hire a professional graphic artist. It shouldn’t be a huge expense but it is definitely a good investment. Also, please have a decent author photograph taken. In the end, your face is part of your image and I assume you’ll be wearing it at book signings and  video interviews. You might find a smooth looking mugshot among your selfies, or more probably something taken by your friend or spouse (or both you lucky totterpot). Please don’t settle for “human-looking”.  If you need a professional photographer find just the right light to  bring out your best, get it done.

Set up your FB page

All right! Time to hit that “Create page” button! Go through the steps to create your page. Select the categories which, quite predictably, are “Author” and “Writer”,  and upload your pics and produce your first post, then sit back and enjoy the result of your hard work and try not to focus too much on that “Zero followers” detail. Followers will come, because now it’s time to…

Link to and from your author website.

Because you do have an author website right? If you don’t, do not panic, Setting one up with Wix or WordPress is fairly easy and, as a plus, you already have your brand and image figured out. Make sure your website displays the links to all the social media channels in which you wish to appear as author. Start sharing your author page posts around and be patient.

All, right, you’re not patient. You want followers, you CRAVE page follows like some social media intoxicated Gollum. And that’s when Facebook’s wicked little algorithm sidles up to you and asks you if you’d like to promote your page

Do NOT advertise.

Never advertise a Facebook page. You may want to promote a post, if you really want it to get extra visibility, but most of the time, because of how dispersive Facebook is, you’re wasting money which you could have spent on that profile photo.

Luckily, I have another article where I walk authors through some very effective strategies to get hundreds of engaged, interested followers without spending.

Let me know if you appreciated this article by liking, commenting, retweeting/sharing and generally clicking all the other clickable social thingies for my posts!

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Now, I’m the first to say the prince of dialogue, “say” is the most unobtrusive and neutral of all tags, and I am in no way trying to encourage you to chump up your text with every single one of these alternatives, and a sign of good healthy dialogue is when you can actually skip a lot of tags because you have made it clear who is saying what. That said I do believe a little more range is no bad thing, and in those cases where you actually would like to specify exactly how someone uttered something, you can rely on the amazingly vast expressive capability of the English language. Here is my personal and ultimate list of speech verbs. Feel free to scan through it to see how many you already know.

I have provided a brief definition for each speech verb.

Next: speech verbs listed alphabetically. ->

Views: 1623

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Ever read a book and hit one of those twists that just change and redefine your understanding of everything you’ve read up to that point? How about when you trust your favorite, heroic and kind character all the way to the moment when all their actions suddenly fall into place as parts of a superbly evil plan which they’ve been telling you about all along, and implying that 1) you’ve been blindly following an evil mastermind, 2) the entire plot just took a sharp turn in the worse possible direction and 3) your Amazon money has definitely been well spent. Ever run into something like that?

Successful and gripping plot twists are not easy to craft, and the ability to provide all the elements that point to the solution, while simutaneously leading the reader to believe something completely different (until you drop the last piece of the puzzle), is a difficult art to master, and different authors will go about it in different ways.

My approach has been, in my opinion, slightly unorthodox.

In my side job as English teacher (everybody knows I’m first and foremost an author with a teaching hobby which, for the moment, happens to be my principal form of income), I often used to struggle for ways to prod my students into asking questions, to practice the relevant grammar. My initial lessons used to be like this:

Me: “The cat is on the table. Repeat with me now, ‘where is the cat?’, go on.”

Students: “you just told us.”

You can see the system wasn’t eliciting many questions. In my desperate search for better ideas I came across some activities which were intended to favor lateral thinking. The activities started with a simple example:

• A man with a black mask and a black suit is walking along a black tarmac road. There are no street lamps and the road is in the country, away from the city lights. Suddenly a black car arrives at high speed, its lights are off so the man does not see any bright headlights coming towards him.
  At the last moment, the car swerves and avoids the man.
  How is this possible?
  
  
• Answer: it is day.

Now, I admit I should have guessed that one, but at the time I was a rather linear thinker, and the answer took me entirely by surprise. There were other such puzzles, with varying degrees of difficulty, which could be presented as a question and answer game. So I tried those in class and, as a result, I got an outstanding amount of interaction and responses from my students. Another thing I noticed was how they too were often surprised and blown away by the unexpected solution to the little mysteries.

That’s when I decided to take all those lateral thinking puzzles and looked inside to see what made them tick. I came up with this:

• The assumed.
  If I tell you “A man with a pack on his back went into a field and died.” you will imagine he either died of thirst, was attacked by someone/something or his backpack, for no apparent reason, exploded. If you can make your readers assume something is true although you never really specified it, they will not be able to decode the situation all the way to when you reveal the one detail that removes the assumption.
  I didn’t say he walked into the field, did I? His parachute didn’t open.
  
• The misdirection.
  You can actively make readers unaware of a simple fact by giving them clues which apparently exclude it, such as the story of the dark, unlit street and the car with no headlights. This method is a little more aggressive than the previous one, and, although effective, should not be used too often as it creates mistrust in the reader.
  
• Tunnel vision.
  Some puzzles rely on their context for their correct solution. If you remove the surroundings, you’re left with a mystery, for example: “A hotel manager sees a boot and says ‘I’m ruined!'”. This is one of my favorite puzzles as it elicits a barrage of questions from my students. Without the correct context, you will not be able to focus on anything else but what the puzzle says. In my short story The Janitor, the tale begins with the protagonist apparently confessing to some crime. As the tale continues you learn the motives which brought him to commit his actions, but in the last paragraph, context is given and… well no spoilers here, of course, especially because there’s a second, final twist in the last sentence, along with a nice, slow burn…
  Tunnel vision puzzles are very effective and, if you give just the right clues that seem to lead on but never clarify anything, you can play the game for the entire duration of the story. I’ve kept classes hanging for weeks with clues about the hotel manager, before revealing it happens during a game of ‘Monopoly’.
  
• The Jigsaw
  Similar to the tunnel vision method, the jigsaw requires more planning, since all clues actually do point to the solution, but given in that specific order, the puzzle will not be solved until the very last piece is in place. I use this method for longer novels, in which I may not plan the details of actions and dialogues, but I know exactly when and what piece of the puzzle will be shown during the entire length of the book.

The more you practice these methods and play around with puzzle stories (I have an entire YouTube channel where I present a new one every week), the more you will be able to plot a twist into your own story, to the delight of your readers, but even more so, your own amazement. That’s how you know the twist really works.

Don’t forget you can get a free short story just by signing up to my newsletter. You will also be invited to virtual book fairs and get the opportunity to win a $25 Amazon gift card.

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That said, if you’ve seen the film and want to dig into the details of the rules of time travel, read on, there will be no intentional references or spoilers regarding “Endgame” or other MCU stuff, although it might be fun to see if I score any other unintended quotes. –

So you wish to include time traveling as part of your story? How hard can it be? Have a nutty scientist or brainy professor come up with a credible time machine, or stumble across one if you want to avoid some of the techy mumbo-jumbo, have them jump backwards or forwards to the time requested by the plot, and then, for the perfect Hollywood ending, everyone jumps back to their timeline and enjoys the cool effects of tweaking history.

Problems deriving from time-travel? There’s nothing so terrible about becoming your own father or mother (or both) that can’t be fixed with some counseling and some good parenting. (I think Douglas Adams said that.) It’s just like wiping a page from a history book and writing it again the way you want it to be, right?

Wrong.

The truth is that when it comes to time travel, the territory becomes rather uncertain if not entirely boggled. Here are ten things you should keep in mind when you start playing around with time.

1. If you are about to leap into the past, then it has already happened.

That’s right. The moment you allow your characters to jump back in time, then the alterations they will apply will already have taken place. This results in our first great dilemma: now that history has changed and the problem solved, what will motivate the heroes to jump back? When the solution is so effective that the problem never existed, who will need to think of a solution? One way to solve this is to conceal the fact that the current state of affairs is, in hindsight, a result of that jump, and that another, far worse, scenario would have ensued from not going back. In other words, the travelers’ motivations are not determined by something that will change, but something they have already changed.

2. Your traveler must, in no way, be connected to the facts he or she is trying to change.

As a collateral point to rule number one, any traveler altering events impacting their own timeline will automatically fail. This is because, by altering time, they will inevitably alter their own memory of what happened, and that will ultimately lead to different decisions the next time around.

“Wait what next time?”, you ask. Well that leads us to:

4. It’s a loop. An infinite one.

Get it?

3. It’s a loop. An infinite one.

A successful leap into the past is one that will always have happened. One in which the traveler will, at a certain point, either devise their own way to travel, or be thrown back in time by a series of events which must, always, result in the same outcome. Time will not permit an ever-changing number of different outcomes, it will stabilize into a flow where the jump never happens, or where it does, but always follows the same exact script. The effects of this on the characters can be very dark, or also quite funny. Especially for short jumps. Just like this little joke.

5. Time is memory.

In other words, our only sense for the passing of time is our ability to keep a record of past events. As a result, altering time inevitably alters the record. There are only two ways out of this paradox, in my opinion: One way is based on the theory of alternative universes which is so popular nowadays. In this theory, when you travel in time what you really do is jump to a different reality where what you did has changed history, but you come from a universe where nothing was done, so your memory of that history remained the same. This theory has a few flaws, well pointed out by the Rick & Morty series, including meeting infinite yous intent on changing their histories, and infinite other yous content with their lot and suddenly buggered by all the goddamn people turning up at their door.

6. The Bootstrap Paradox.

This theory was described quite beautifully in a Dr. Who episode and went like this:

Imagine your character is a Beethoven fanatic. He packs his collection of sheet music and jumps back to meet the man himself to discuss all things musical. When he finally sees Ludwig, our hero is horrified to discover the great composer doing nothing but sitting on the sofa and scratching his butt. (I think the Doctor put it more elegantly). Panicking, the time traveler shoves all of Beethoven’s sheet music in the loafing musician’s hands and hurriedly leaps back to the present to discover, to his relief, that the great Ludwig still is the world-renown musical genius.

The paradox is this: who composed the music? Our hero would swear it was Beethoven, but Ludwig would say it was a frantic looking man with a funny German accent who made it and gave it to him. You can’t jump back in time and hand J.K. Rowling a copy of Harry Potter. That’s worse than becoming your own parent.

“The Fairlight Project” book series is based on a 500-year long bootstrap paradox.

.

7. I don’t have time for number 7.

Grab a free ebook,quick & fun to read, here.

8. Beware the uncanny valley. (Yes, there’s one in time travel too)

People who read sci-fi appreciate the imaginative way authors apply their scientific knowledge. A lack of scientific detail will undermine the credibility of your story. When it comes to time and time travel, science itself becomes rather iffy. To put it in other words, there’s a whole lot of fi in the sci already. Some writers will try to compensate this by adding even more details on exploiting naturally occurring nano-wormholes, strings, membranes and that ever recurring buzzword, the quantum [insert something here]. The result being that, past a certain threshold, the authors themselves get so garbled as to put off even the most hardened geek. Make it scientzy, but don’t overdo it. Sometimes it’s preferable to simplify too much rather than overexplain it. Ratscrap’s time jumping ability, for instance, came from a simple magic potion.

A magic potion? Jeez, who am I trying to fool here. That’s almost as bad as quantum.

9. Forward jumps are ok. Sometimes.

Making your hero jump forward in time is absolutely doable. Unless you have the nerve to also bring them back. In that case all of the above rules apply again. Knowledge of future events could potentially lead to attempts aimed at altering that future, but in that case, the original future never existed, so why change it? Head aches anyone? (One of Ratscrap’s side effects of time travel was a massive, sentient head ache).

10. Alternatives to time travel.

There are a couple of more approachable alternatives to time travel, to avoid headaches, embarrassing family reunions and all that excessive mucking about with quantum and J.K.Rowling.

One way to travel into the past safely is to “tune in” to a past moment. This can be done by sending back a hidden probe, or waiting for when everyone will have a memory chip installed into their brains and simply play back their experience, or even sync present and past atoms to create a replica via, sigh, quantum entanglement. In all three cases the past cannot be altered but only experienced as a hologram or virtual reality.

Another alternative to changing the past is even simpler. As stated in rule no. 5, time is memory. Do you really need to send your character back in time to hide the fact that they murdered someone? Wouldn’t it be relatively easier to alter everyone’s memory of the event, so that the murder becomes an accident? In this case the hero’s memory would remain intact, as well as anyone’s they wish to preserve.

Thank you for reading my ten rules of time travel. These are just ideas, not to be taken as absolute guidelines. Just make sure your plot holds, maybe catch a glimpse of the future to check how readers will respond and you will have seen – are going to have seen…

Truth be told, hardest thing about writing time travel are the damn tenses.

Ian Lahey writes humorous science fiction and fantasy. He spends the days reminiscing the time when a book critic used his name alongside those of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. The critic also used “nowhere near” and “what a pillock” but these are trivial details. You can judge for yourself by grabbing one of Ian’s books or, if you’re inclined for a short read or just not ready to cough up real money just yet, pick up a free short story here.

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