Abyss, on 09 November 2009 - 05:10 PM, said:
Here's three:
I'm wondering about your sense of timing the 'mood' of a scene in the course of a book. Do you start writing a scene with the intent to make it comedy because you feel it's the right time for a laugh (by example, following on a particularly grim series of events you decide it's time to lighten the tone), or does it evolve as you wright out the scene (the plot calls for two characters to decide on a course of action and in writing the dialogue you decide it works best as a funny scene), or another way?
Not sure if this answers your question specifically, Abyss, but this (from the first interview as above), deals with humour and comic timing. I think the bold refers directly to your query, though:
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Midnight Tides is, at the moment, our favourite book from the series. Although all of your work features humour, Tehol Beddict and Bugg take it to a new level, and it is often wonderfully surreal. Was this a conscious effort to inject a little more light-heartedness into the series?
A conscious effort? I don’t think so. I like to think the humour was present in every book, but I do accept that Tehol and Bugg delivered something new. But not as new as it may at first seem. Their precedents were Iskaral and Kruppe, as both characters engaged in a peculiar self-referential style of humour. Tehol and Bugg just took that one step further. The consciousness involved in their creation had more to do with offsetting the sheer gravity of the rest of Midnight Tides.
But even then, they arrived (on that rooftop) in one of those uncanny, slightly bewildering, fully spontaneous manifestations that hit writers on occasion. A bed? A blanket? All out of nowhere, completely unplanned. Once they arrived, I just sort of sat back and let them run with it.
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Q: In my opinion, “Reaper’s Gale” featured both more humor and more tragedy than any other book in the series so far, and seems to be something you’ve been building toward since you first wrote “Gardens of the Moon”. Now Shakespeare has proven that tragedy & humor can go hand-in-hand, but how do you feel about the two subjects and their relationship with one another?
Steven: Tragedy can be unrelenting, but often that becomes counter-productive, especially if one is dealing with a vast series of stories. The reader needs a break, a breather – unless of course the writer decides to withhold such relief, for whatever nefarious, cruel reasons might serve. I don’t think of the two as being locked in some form of diametrical opposition. If I was to diagram all this, it’d be as three points rather than two. Tragedy is answered by humanity – a gesture of hope or redemption. Comedy relates more to issues of relief when it comes to structure, or happens to be tightly bound to a specific set of characters. It’s related to tragedy, but not in any direct way (for me at least). Sometimes laughter is the only answer to something overwhelmingly tragic – as when, for example, I stand at an intersection and watch hundreds of cars and trucks whiz past. And it dawns on me that nobody really gives a flying fuck about this planet – today’s smoking addiction isn’t cigarettes, it’s oil, and who isn’t blowing smoke in all our faces? Tragedy, comedy, haha.
And that's from the second interview linked above.
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