About This Training
Add Humor to your Writing Toolbox (90 mins)
Humor has the power to entertain, surprise, enlighten, and even move readers. If you appreciate it in other people’s writing but aren’t quite sure how to bring it to your own, this class is for you! We’ll look at the building blocks of comedy and explore how writers use incongruity, hyperbole, dialogue, detail, and other elements of craft to bring humor to their work. Whether you’re looking to write an all-out comic essay or novel, or you simply want to bring moments of humor to otherwise “serious” work, you’ll walk away with concrete tips, techniques, and inspiration.
About Jane Roper
Jane Roper is the author of two novels, The Society of Shame, and Eden Lake, and a memoir, Double Time: How I Survived–and Mostly Thrived–Through the First Three Years of Mothering Twins.
Jane’s essays and humor have appeared in Salon, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Millions, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Cognoscenti, Writers’ Digest and elsewhere, and has been included in the anthology Labor Day: True Birth Stories by today’s Best Women Writers. She has taught writing at GrubStreet, Follow Your Art Community Studios, The University of Iowa, the Sanibel Writers’ Conference, and The Muse & The Marketplace. Jane is also a freelance copywriter and brand strategist.
For two years, Jane was the producer and on-air host of “The Zeitgeist,” on A Mighty Blaze, where she interviewed authors whose books tackle of-the-moment themes like gender, race, class, culture, ability, technology and health. Her guests included Kristen Arnett, Jessamine Chan, Ruman Alaam, Barbara Lembke, Francine Prose, Rickie Lee Jones, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Neema Avashia, and many more.
Originally from Fairfield, Connecticut, Jane is a graduate of Williams College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She currently lives just north of Boston in a drafty Victorian house on a hill with her husband, singer-songwriter Alastair Moock, and teenage twins. When she is not working, writing, parenting, cooking, hiking, indoor rock climbing or wasting time on social media, Jane can be found trying to read and promptly falling asleep.
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