Word to the Wise on Wit

Today we’re going to talk about one of my favorite things.

Witty comebacks!

Let us strive to be honest with each other. It’s not just me. We all love witty comebacks.

Main characters, side characters, bad guys, it doesn’t matter. We love them. Readers love them.

There’s a reoccurring theme on this blog though, that I’m going to bring up, and that is that writing is an art. And so are most of its aspects. And just like writing itself, there is an art to witty retorts. They have to be used with discretion by the appropriate characters. Snappy dialogue is great, but it can be overwhelming.

In real life, the number of times that you are actually able to come up with a witty retort in the moment are typically, unless you’re a thespian that’s really good at improv, rather rare. Even though a few minutes later you think of that perfect golden response that would have made the whole room go “Ohhhhhhhh.”

Which is one of the nice things about writing witty dialogue. YOU don’t have to come up with the comeback right off the bat, because YOU have time to think about an awesome response and it’s your character that’s coming up with it without missing a beat. It’s severely tempting. Like I said though, most people can’t come up with responses like that all the time. So is it really that likely that your characters will be able to?

I already admitted that I love witty comeback and dialogue, and I will confess that in my first draft, probably 80% of the dialogue between my two main characters was nothing but sarcasm and wit. Which was a lot of fun to write. Writing sarcasm is fun. No denying that.

However one of the things that I had to take a hard look at was the fact that pretty much anytime my character were doing something plot moving they were exchanging witty banter. And so one of the many things I’ve had to do as I work on my second draft is work on removing a lot of that and making it resembled more like a conversation two human beings would have.

I’m not getting rid of all of it by a longshot though. It’s way too much fun. And we all love the sarcastic witty characters. And it’s perfectly alright for your sarcastic witty character to be able to come up with sarcastic witty responses if that’s their character.

But there is a threshold for it. That threshold being reality.