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.

Why You Will (Probably) Never Be As Famous As JK Rowling

Let us all take this moment to realize a hard cold fact.

None of us are probably ever going to be half as famous as JK Rowling.

Or Rick Riordan, or Stephanie Meyer, or Cassandra Clare, or Susan Collins, or any other huge contemporary authors. You're probably never going to have a movie made out of your books. You're probably never going to travel around the world on book tours. You're probably never even going to make enough money to live off of. This is even if you do manage to get published.

I'm not trying to crush dreams. I'm caught up in the same dream as the rest of you. But as much as we like to retreat into our worlds of fantasy and fiction, we do have to acknowledged the reality of the fact.

I'm not saying—just to make it clear— that I will and you won't muahahaha. No, this applies to me and Margaret just as much as it does to you. It's not because we're young; it's simply an occupational hazard of writing books.

According to information published by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), there were over 320,000 NEW book titles published in 2010 in the US alone. That's not including printing off more Harry Potters or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finns. That's new book titles. A great majority of these book titles will not do well. An even smaller percentage of those will become popular, and an even smaller percentage of that will become mainstream enough for the authors name to be recognizable. 

Here's an example that might be closer to home. Take a look around next time you go to a library or book store. Do you see how many books there are? Depending on the size of the library/book store you're at, there could be hundreds, maybe even thousands of books there. We'll forget everything that's nonfiction and wasn't originally published in the past... 20 years.

That's still a lot of books.

And of them, odds are that there are probably 20 or so that the lay man would be able to remember the author of. Those are really small odds. Becoming famous writing books is an exception, not a rule. Being able to make a good living writing books tends to be more of an exception.

Personally— as in this is my opinion— I would not want to be as famous as Rowling. I love her books, and I give her books credit for first making me want to write books myself. But think about how the rest of her life is going to go. She may be richer than the Queen, but she can essentially never write anything again. She tried and "it wasn't as good as Harry Potter". She will never be able to escape that shadow. The book that she wrote under a fake name was her attempt to escape it. She's obviously not entirely content to just rest on her laurels and I don't think I would be either.

I am going to take a moment to admit here though, that the title of this post is "Why You Will (Probably) Never Be As Famous As JK Rowling". Who knows? I doubt that she herself thought that she was ever going to be the authoress of books on the 10 Most Published Books of All Time list. Maybe you will become that one in 7 billion. 

The odds are though, as you can see from the 1/7 billion proportion... not exactly likely.