3 interviews: Humor & satire edition
Hi guys! For the rest of the week, I’m running back some fave interviews from the archives. Enjoy!
For today, here are Q&As with three writers in the humor/satire space whom you should definitely know:
1. Caroline Moss on the process for writing the book Hey Ladies, AKA the best satire of modern wedding culture to date:
When we started the series, it was literally like, us emailing each other back and forth and we'd be gchatting each other being like, "okay I'm going to respond as Nicole" or "I feel like Jen should send an email now." When we started writing the book, we tried doing it in a google doc and we absolutely got stage fright. We couldn't get anything good out. We had to honor the gmail. Once we did that it was like, the easiest, most fun project ever.
2. Irving Ruan on what it felt like when he published his first piece for Shouts & Murmurs:
I was over the moon excited and felt like I had just lost ten pounds of fat, like I was in the best shape of life. But for many days and weeks afterward, I thought that the universe was pranking me. Like, I still think that it’s absolutely bonkers that somebody out there is willing to publish my dumb Dunkin’ Donuts jokes or half-baked thoughts on Gary Busey. I still have imposter’s syndrome and am waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and say “you’re not good at this, please stop.”
3. Caitlin Kunkel on the importance of pressure-testing your ideas (pssst sign up to take her 1-day Catapult seminar here!!)
I think it’s natural when you first start writing, especially in a comedic format, to seize the first idea that you think will work and run with it. After all, ideas are hard! And completing a piece feels great. But spending the time at the top of the process to really interrogate a concept, make sure you can easily write jokes on it — THAT is where a beginning writer should spend most of their energy. Your first few ideas are either 1) too basic and a lot of people will have them, or 2) too diffuse/not crystallized, and it will be hard to make specific, heightened jokes on them.
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