Making Irony Work by Randy Ingermanson | Advanced Fiction Writing

 

Making Irony Work

 

by Randy Ingermanson 

 

Advanced Fiction Writing

 

If you’ve spent much time at all on email lists or social media, you’ve probably noticed a couple of weird things that happen:

• You make a hilarious comment, and then some whacko you don’t even know takes your remark seriously and thrashes you for being “stupid” when you were actually being ironic.
• Somebody you don’t know says some incredibly ridiculous thing, so you take the time to point out how dumb that is, and then they claim they were just being ironic and you didn’t get it, so you’re the dummy.

Never happened to you? Well it’s happened to people I know.

What’s going on here?

Context is King

Irony, satire, sarcasm—call it whatever you want—only works when your listeners or reader have context.

When you use irony, your intended meaning is the opposite of the face value of your words. So people need to understand you and the context of the situation, or they won’t even recognize you’re being ironic.

It’s dangerous to toss out an ironic remark when people don’t have the context to spot the irony.

Tone Matters

Even if people don’t have much context, they can often tell from the tone of your voice or your facial expressions that you’re being ironic. Which is what makes email lists and social media so tricky. Because written words don’t pronounce themselves or make appropriate facial expressions. Written words just lie there dead on the screen.

If you’re a good writer and you write enough words, people can often pick up cues from your written tone. But it takes longer to establish a written tone than a verbal one.

Using Irony in Fiction

You can use irony and satire and sarcasm in your fiction. You just have to lay the groundwork.

You need to set the context clearly, and that takes time. There’s no rule on how many words it takes to set the context. Use enough to get the job done.

Irony and sarcasm give you a golden opportunity to create conflict in your novel. One character says something they mean as a joke. Another character takes it literally. Sparks fly. It happens all the time in real life. It’ll be believable in your fiction—but only if your reader gets the intended meaning. Which goes back to filling in the context.

Homework

• Do you use sarcasm or irony or satire in your novel?
• What information will your reader need to know in order to get the joke?
• Will that information be generally known ten years from now? In a foreign country? By people who aren’t in your subculture?
• Are there any ways you can work in some of that information into the story so your book is accessible to more people, for longer?

 

About The Author

Randy Ingermanson is a theoretical physicist and the award-winning author of six novels. He has taught at numerous writing conferences over the years and publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.

 

 Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

 

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