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Comedy Is Like Fictional Charm. It's The Charm Of Fiction. Or The Charisma Of Fiction. When You Meet Somebody Who's Immediately Charismatic, You're Attracted To That Person. And In Fiction It's Got To Come Out In Either One Of Two Ways: In The Prose Itself, And You're Hooked Immediately Because You Never Want To Leave Such A Colorful And Penetrating World. Or, It's Simply Being A Funny Writer.

-Joshua Ferris

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Comedy Is Like Fictional

Joshua Ferris

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Comedy Is Like Fictional Charm. It's The Charm Of Fiction. Or The Charisma Of Fiction. When You Meet Somebody Who's Immediately Charismatic, You're Attracted To That Person. And In Fiction It's Got To Come Out In Either One Of Two Ways: In The Prose Itself, And You're Hooked Immediately Because You Never Want To Leave Such A Colorful And Penetrating World. Or, It's Simply Being A Funny Writer.

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Once I Had The Voice, I Knew I Wasn't Going To Fall Off The Bicycle. I Tap Right Back Into It. It Really Was Like Learning How To Ride A Bike - You Never Forget, And I Was Able To Carry It Along With Some Ease. I Never Encountered Any Stumping Problems That Left Me Not Knowing What To Do, So I Was Mostly Able To Hold My Ground. Of Course, I Should Mention That It Took Me A Long Time To Actually Acquire The Voice; There Were A Lot Of Frustrated Attempts Along The Way, Revisions To Long Sections And Versions Of The Book That I Abandoned.

Comedy Is Like Fictional Charm. It's The Charm Of Fiction. Or The Charisma Of Fiction. When You Meet Somebody Who's Immediately Charismatic, You're Attracted To That Person. And In Fiction It's Got To Come Out In Either One Of Two Ways: In The Prose Itself, And You're Hooked Immediately Because You Never Want To Leave Such A Colorful And Penetrating World. Or, It's Simply Being A Funny Writer.

The Internet Takes A Lot Of The Anxiety Of Life Away. It's A Kind Of Deity. You're Never Lonely. You're Always Distracted. If You Spend Enough Time On It, There's Not Really That Nagging Sensation Of Existential Despair; It Erases It Very Effectively. And It's Monolithic. And Thanks To It, We've Got The Ways To Linger There After Death - Your Blog Exists Afterwards, Your E-mail Exists Afterwards.

Things Could Be Worse And Things Could Be So Much Better.

I Think Comedy Is So Much Easier To Do On The Page Than It Is In Real Life. When I'm Writing, Comedy Is An Easy Way To Win Over The Reader. You're Automatically More Disposed To Keep Reading, Thinking Maybe, "i'll Get Another Laugh Or Two." I Think It's A Survival Instinct In Me. I Mean, You Don't Want To Lose These Guys Within Five Or Ten Pages. You Want Them To Keep Going. I Think To Some Extent It's A Desperate Measure That I Throw Out There, Because A Novel Isn't A Complete Waste Of Time If It Made You Laugh.

We Suffered Failures Of Imagination Just Like Everyone Else, Our Daring Was Wanting, And Our Daily Contentment Too Nearly Adequate For Us To Give It Up.

My First Job Is To Write A Book That I Believe Is Compelling And Deserves The Long Sustained Attention That Any Novel Requires, And To Worry About The Commerce Only Late In The Game.

I've Always Thought Things Were Absurd. It Would Take A Lot More Effort For Me To See Things As Reasonable.

The Office Is A Romantic Enabler Because You're Always Around The Person You Have A Crush On. There's No Escape From, And Maybe No Desire To Escape From, Those Pressure-cooker Conditions. And There's An Automatic Series Of Things You Have To Talk About All The Time.

I'm Being Provided With Some Emotional Ballast By Giving Me An Intimate Portrait Of One Character In Particular In Contrast To The Collective. I'm Fortunate That I Had Very Sympathetic Readers, But Ordinarily - If A Book Makes You Laugh Too Much, It Shifts From "literature" To "entertainment."

After I Left College I Thought, Very Naively, That Either You Became Someone Interesting - An Artist - Or You Went Into Academia. If You Ended Up In An Office You Were Dull And Lacking. And I Ended Up In An Office.

The Whole Time I Was Writing, I Had To Fight My Normal Inclination To Be Funny, To Sort Of Patch Humor In, In Order To Convey All Of The Disruptions Of The Disease To The Family Dynamic, The Loss Of Individuality, The Impact On Professional Life, And The Sanity Of The Main Character. Of Course, That's Not To Say It Never Sneaks In; There's Some Black Comedy In There, Like When He Shows Up To Court Wearing A Bicycle Helmet And Won't Take It Off.

There Were Times Where I Felt I Was Pressing A Little Bit Too Hard With The Humor, And I Had To Pull Back, Because The Overriding Concern Of The Book Was To Create This Disease That Had No Cure And Make You Pay Attention To Every Emotional Stage Of What Happens.

The Main Questions Of Everyday Life Are Too Enormous To Answer In Any Definitive Sense.

We Told Him To Get On With It. We Liked Wasting Time, But Almost Nothing Was More Annoying Than Having Our Wasted Time Wasted On Something Not Worth Wasting It On.

I Don't Write Directly On To The Computer Because I Don't Think Well Facing Forward With Fingers On A Keyboard. I Think Better Looking Down Holding A Pen. And The Concentration Quotient Of Pen And Paper Is Higher Than When I'm Moving Words Around On Screen.

That's One Of The Things About Comedy - I Think It Works Best When It's Contextualized, As Opposed To Kind Of An Island Of Cleverness.

Sometimes You Have To Make Decisions That Necessarily Exclude The Collective. It's More Difficult To Be A Friend - Even Though They Know Each Other And They Treat Each Other Like Friends, It's More Of A Challenge For Them. It's Just Institutional Fact; The Two Characters That Are The Most Aloof Are The Ones Who Have The Most Responsibility.

I Always Knew From The Beginning That This Was The Only Way To Write Then We Came To The End - That It Had To Be In First - Person Plural If It Was Going To Illustrate How The Individual Becomes Part Of The Collective. I Had No Interest In Writing The Book In A More Conventional Voice. It Goes Back To That Fascination I Had With Telling A Story In Multiple Ways. It Was The Only Choice I Gave Myself, Really - I Said "this Is It, Pal. If You Can't Tell A Story This Way, You're Going To Have To Abandon The Book. Write It This Way Or Give Up."

Everyone Desires Relationships And Community. Most People Want To Belong To A Cohesive, Like-minded Group. It Staves Off Loneliness. It Promotes Identity. These Are Natural And Very Human Instincts.

Every Time You Hear Someone Read Your Book And Liked Your Book, You're Never Sure Whether That's Going To Follow With A Similar Remark From Someone Else. Perhaps I Have Low Expectations, But Whenever I Hear Someone Say, 'i Liked Your Book,' I Don't Know If It's Going To Happen Again.

I Think If There Hadn't Been The One Passage Of The Book That Mostly Abandons The Humor, And Focuses Very Intently On One Person's Struggle With Cancer, It Wouldn't Have Been A Critical Success. So That Was A Very Deliberate Decision, To Say "well, If You Think It's All Fun And Games, It's Not." So That Was My Approach: We're Going To Have As Much Fun As I Can Possibly Provide, But The Serious Things That Might Normally Pass By You Are Not Going To Be Lost.

I'm Not Sure That All Books Aren't That Way. I Think That Might Apply To Any Book I Was Writing. The Book Was Kind Of The Product Of This Enormous Infatuation I Had, Not Only With The Office And Office Politics, But With Perspective, And Trying To Tell A Story From As Wide A Range Of Perspectives As You Possibly Can. I Tried To Capture It All With The First-person Plural, But Once I Settled On That, I Used It To Tell The Story From As Many Angles As I Could. I Guess, To Put It Romantically, It Was About A Love Affair With The Craft Of Perspective.

I Think It's A Very Bad Idea For Someone To Start Writing For A Readership.

It Is Really Irritating To Work With Irritating People

Irritating People

Without Work, So Much Of One's Identity Just Evaporates.

Baseball Is The Slow Creation Of Something Beautiful. It Is The Almost Boringly Paced Accumulation Of What Seems Slight Or Incidental Into An Opera Of Bracing Suspense. The Game Will Threaten Never To End, Until Suddenly It Forces You To Marvel At How It Came To Be Where It Is And To Wonder At How Far It Might Go. It’s The Drowsy Metamorphosis Of The Dull Into The Indescribable.

All Broken Hearts Are Circumstantial. Every Lovelorn Jerk Is The Victim Of Bad Timing, Good Intentions, And Someone Else’s Poor Decision Making.

Everything Was Always Something But Something – And Here Was The Rub – Could Never Be Everything.

I Can't Trace Thematic Similarities Between Then We Came To The End And The Unnamed To A Life Event; I Think It's More Just A Natural Progression As A Writer. Everything Changes In The Second Book - Tonally, Character-wise, Situationally - And On Top Of That, I Think I Wanted A Challenge. I Wanted To See If I Could Do It.

We Had The Great Good Fortune And Shortcomings Of Character That Marked Every Generation That Had Never Seen War.

Yet For All The Depression No One Ever Quit. When Someone Quit, We Couldn't Believe It. 'i'm Becoming A Rafting Instructor On The Colorado River,' They Said. 'i'm Touring College Towns With My Garage Band.' We Were Dumbfounded. It Was Like They Were From Another Planet. Where Had They Found The Derring-do? What Would They Do About Car Payments? We Got Together For Going Away Drinks On Their Final Day And Tried To Hide Our Envy While Reminding Ourselves That We Still Had The Freedom And Luxury To Shop Indiscriminately.

A Dentist Is Only Half The Doctor He Claims To Be.

If Someone Were Plucked From The Group And Given Those Responsibilities, They Might Find Themselves Growing More Aloof, Just By Virtue Of That Promotion. Suddenly The Group Culture Excludes You. I Saw This In My Own Working Life, And I Don't Think It's A Coincidence - I Sensed A Kind Of Loneliness In Middle Managers Especially.

The People At The Very Top Could Fall By And Grace You With Their Presence And Give You A Little Largesse, And You'd Be "oh, I'm So Beloved." In A Way, It Was Kind Of Like Flattery. The Middle Managers Didn't Quite Have That Cachet, But At The Same Time, They Had To Seem Like They Were Of That Caliber. So There's A Little Bit Of Loneliness At The Heart Of Those With A Little Bit Of Power.

I Think A Fairly Common Behavior Among Fiction Writers Is That They Want To Help. They're Generally Charitable People. They're Interested In The World. They're Curious, They're Empathetic. They Understand Suffering. They Don't Turn Away From That. But What They Do Is Essentially Useless. Except For The Sake Of The Thing Itself.

I Think One Of The Ways You Avoid Being Angry Is To Avoid Being Angry At The People In Power. They Might Do Crappy Things, And Piss You Off, And Make Bad Decisions, But They Shouldn't Be Hated Simply Because They're In Power. And I Thought It Was Important To Humanize Them If The Book Was Going To Be Even-handed To All The Different Ways You Encounter People At Work.

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I Come From A Very Illustrious Line Of Divorces. We Love To Get Divorced In My Family. My Mother And Father Have Been Married Four Times Each - Eight Ceremonies With The Best Of Intentions.

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She Looks At Herself In The Mirror. The Idea Is To Look Sexy Again. And For Whom Exactly? Yourself, Of Course. Yes, Well, That's All Wonderfully Self-affirming And Very Strong-minded As Any Decent Woman Should Be These Days, But Let's Just Face Facts Here And Say That When A Woman - No, When A Person Is Thinking About Feeling Sexy, It Is Always With The Idea Of Someone Else In Mind.

I Know What To Do With My Life. I Just Don't Know What To Do With This One Night.

A Child, Thought Carl, Is Not The Only Result Of Childbirth. A Mother, Too, Is Born. You See Them Every Day--nondescript Women With A Bulge Just Above The Groin, Slightly Double-chinned. Perpetually Forty. Someone's Mother, You Think. There Is A Child Somewhere Who Has Made This Woman Into A Mother, And For The Sake Of The Child She Has Altered Her Appearance To Better Play The Part.

You Think I Alienate Myself From Society? Of Course I Alienate Myself From Society. It’s The Only Way I Know Of Not Being Constantly Reminded Of All The Ways I’m Alienated From Society.

The Thing Is, For Me, As A Fiction Writer, I Don't Think There's A Finer Testament To Our Lives Than This Thing That's Being Spurned - The Emotional Intelligence, The Ethics, The Beauty. It's All There. It's All So Fully Contained In A Novel That Succeeds. But At The Same Time, I Understand The Impulse To Put Away Childish Things.

Why Shouldn't It Be That Way For The Rest Of Us? Why Not Just Go With It? Just Walk The Dog And Send The Tweets And Eat The Scones And Play With The Hamsters And Ride The Bicycles And Watch The Sunsets And Stream The Movies And Never Worry About Any Of It? I Didn't Know It Could Be That Easy. I Didn't Know That Until Just Now. That Sounds Good To Me.

We Were Fractious And Overpaid. Our Mornings Lacked Promise. At Least Those Of Us Who Smoked Had Something To Look Forward To At Ten-fifteen.

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It Is Forgivable To Say Nothing Out Of Ignorance; It's Inexcusable To Remain Silent Once Awareness Dawns.

Names Generate Meaning In A Short Amount Of Space — They Provoke Thoughts, Questions. That's Something I Like Doing. Of Course, You Have To Be Careful. Sometimes It Can Alienate The Reader, It Can Be Another Level Of Mediation, To Make A Character Carry The Great Burden Of A Metaphoric Name. The Character Can Be A Device Before He Or She Becomes A Person, And That Can Be A Bad Thing For A Writer Who Wants To Offer Up A Kind Of Emotional Proximity In The Work. It's A Constant Struggle, The Desire To Be Playful And The Desire To Communicate On Some Very Stark Emotional Level.

I Have Never Stopped Considering Not Becoming A Writer.

I Believe People Think As A Group More Often Than We Might Realize Or Care To Admit. We Like To Believe That We Act As Individuals And Nothing More, But Time And Again - In Corporations And Business, In Politics And Religion, In Fashion And Culture, And In Friendships And Social Circles - We Think And Do As One.

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To Conform Is To Lose Your Soul

We Found Ourselves Wanting To Hurry Time Along, Which Was Not In The Long Run Good For Our Health. Everybody Was Trapped In This Contradiction But Nobody Ever Dared To Articulate It.

We Loved Killing Time And Had Perfected Several Ways Of Doing So. We Wandered The Hallways Carrying Papers That Indicated Some Mission Of Business When In Reality We Were In Search Of Free Candy.

Being Serious Is Serious Business In Fiction. It's Commercial Or Hoi Polloi In Fiction To Be Funny. It's Too Accessible To The Great Unwashed.

A Multifaceted Writer, Very Easy On The Surface To Pin Down But Incredibly Difficult Once You Actually Read Him With Any Depth.

I Wake Up Every Day In Order To Do Something That's Quixotic, And Not Necessarily Called For In The World, But I Do It Because There's Extraordinary Meaning For Me Behind The Effort.

One Thing That I Discovered About Myself Is I Really Don't Like Traveling. I Feel Like It's A Terrible Personal Failing, But I Was So Satisfied To Arrive At The Conclusion.

Humor Is A Very Big Part Of Life, And If You Exclude Humor From Your Book, You're Not Capturing A Very Important Part Of Human Experience.

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