In the Face of Weirdness

All writing is about something weird. Every murder-mystery is about a particularly weird murderer. Horror is about weird things happening to normal people. Fantasy takes place in an entire world of weirdness. Slice of life is about the weird aspects of the real world.

Whenever we encounter something weird, we will have one of two reactions. We will either study it or laugh at it. As a writer, we try to make our writing lean toward serious or comedic. Unfortunately, it will always be the audience who determines which category it is.

I love the movie Kung Fu Hustle. Although it is labeled as a comedy, I love the dramatic parts of it. The comedy is nice, but I think of it as a good martial arts flick. However, Bloodsport (to keep up with martial arts movies) is a serious movie that is laughably horrible.

If you want to understand yourself as a writer, then you need to understand yourself as a person. Go watch The Boondock Saints. Look at Willem Dafoe's character (FBI agent Smecker). To say the least, it's weird. I watched it with a group of friends, all of whom were watching it for the first time. When Dafoe starts dancing around to opera at a murder scene, everybody was laughing out loud. Everybody except me. I was too curious to laugh. I had to know what exactly he was doing. Why was he doing it? How did he come up with it? Why does it work? Nobody else had those thoughts. They just thought it was really weird.

When you see something weird, do you learn or do you laugh? If you learn, then drama may be more your alley. If you laugh, then go for comedy. I have heard people say that drama is easy and comedy is hard. I have also heard the exact opposite. Really, the easier one is the one that matches you. Of course, learning to do both is always good for you.