1)  What elements make a romantic story a comedy.

2)  How does a writer know when humor is working in a story.

3)  Is there a craft to writing humor?

You can also read our interview with Isabel in our Romance Authors Corner at Isabel Wolff.  She provides an outstanding insight into her work and more information on romantic comedies.

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I think the elements that make a romantic story a comedy, are a main character who is flawed, but sympathetic, and who has a lot of personality. She should also have a group of friends around her who are distinct, vivid characters, to act like mirrors – reflecting herself back to her, and warning her when she’s about to make a big mistake, just as we would want our own, good, friends to do. 

Secondary Characters

As with the main characters, the secondary ones also have to be sympathetic – or at least possible to understand. In ‘Out of the Blue’, Faith’s best friend is a very bitchy, glamorous glossy magazine editor. She is not nice – but she is acting for her own reasons, which become clear, so that we understand what it is that motivates her to behave as she does – basically she is pursuing a vendetta against Faith’s husband, Peter. 

In 'Making Minty Malone', there is a horrible, married, columnist called Citronella Pratt, who is vile to other women, always dumping on them in her weekly column, and trying, in particular, to demoralise single women about how sad it is that they’re not married. But the reason why she does this is because her own marriage is a sham – her husband is a closet gay – which she probably knows. And so she has to constantly go on about her wonderfully happy marriage because it isn’t. 

What motivates your characters?

Being a novelist is largely amateur psychotherapy – you have to understand what motivates your characters – why they are as they are. What has happened to them in the past to make them as they are today? I believe that people are only nasty because they’re unhappy. You also have to do something with your secondary characters. You can’t just introduce them and do nothing with them – something has to happen to them too – all the characters in your novel are on a journey – and they must all have changed in some way by the end of it. A good romantic comedy is redemptive – your heroine will have had her life transformed – often through a painful process – but we close the book knowing that her life has changed – for the better. She has been given a second chance, and things will probably now be okay for her. I am an optimistic person, and I think this is another characteristic that my characters have, however much they may occasionally despair.

Credibility of Characters

The other thing is to connect your characters up in a way that’s credible. You can’t just rely on coincidence – the reader won’t like it if they keep bumping into each other in the supermarket. So there have to be characters that connect other characters to each other – perhaps because they work in a job which is very people-based, like public relations say, or because they work in a video store. 

I often tell people that writing novels is 95% problem-solving. How to get characters together. How to get characters in and out of buildings, or even rooms, in a convincing way. And you can’t have a character going to Rome for the weekend, unless it’s going to affect the story in some significant way, so that there’s a reason for it. Otherwise it’s just sightseeing. Everything has to mean something, and to be part of your wider scheme.

Humour & Pathos

A romantic comedy doesn’t have to be all light and frothy – my own novels have a lot of darkness in them, because I like them to combine humour with pathos. I personally think that this is the most successful mix. M*A*S*H, for example, is the ultimate catch-in-the-throat comedy, underpinned by real tragedy, and yet it was very funny, because of the wit and black humour of the characters. 

This was something that had quite an effect on me when I started to think about writing my own novels which are, I hope, redolent of films like ‘Sliding Doors’ and ‘Notting Hill’; they are humorous, but there is quite a lot of darkness and sadness as well. People go to those films primarily for the comedy, but they appreciate the darker themes too, because it makes for a richer experience than a simple knock-about farce. I try to balance the farce with a lot of feeling. My heroines suffer, but they articulate that suffering to the reader in a way which I hope draws them in.

Packed with Incident

A good romantic comedy is also packed with incident – it has to be page-turning, and not just full of reflection. Readers want to be diverted and entertained, and they want to be gripped, so you have to make sure the story is packed with incident, but not so much as to make it exhausting. In other words, there has to be a credible amount of incident, appropriate to the lifestyle of the main character. There also has to be a good mix of dialogue with description. I don’t like books that are all dialogue – but in a romantic comedy you would expect quite a lot – and it certainly helps the story to dance along. But readers also enjoy proper description too – vivid and atmospheric, and well written. Descriptive passages also provide a nice change of pace, slowing the narrative down a little, giving the reader time to reflect.

Isabel Wolff on Romance Comedies -2 (Continue)