by A.C. Williams @ACW_Author

Laughter is good medicine, my friends, and we laugh a lot in my family. Granted, usually we’re laughing because otherwise we’d be crying. Life has been a struggle for a long season, but rather than wallowing in much-deserved and certainly justified angst and exhaustion, we choose to laugh.

I take Proverbs 31:25 seriously, and I will laugh without fear of the future long before I cry about it.

Why does this matter for a storyteller?

Well, on one hand, it helps to be able to laugh about rejection letters. I got one the other day, and I literally laughed out loud. It was a highly complimentary rejection that invited me to resubmit, but the read-between-the-lines context of the letter basically told me that what I’d written was too funny for what the publisher wanted.

Apparently, they wanted drama and feelings and high emotions. I gave them a slightly dramatic, somewhat romantic story about the owner of a retired exotic petting zoo.

To each their own.

Being able to laugh at yourself is a gift. Being able to laugh in the face of rejection and disappointment is skill developed through intentional investments in your spiritual identity in Christ.

But even more important than how you deal with rejection and disappointment, laughter is vital for the stories you tell.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but our world is darker and scarier and more hopeless than it has ever been. Wouldn’t it be glorious to give our audiences a reason to laugh? Wouldn’t it be an amazing gift to give our readers? A story that makes them rejoice? A character who brings them hope?

So, how do we do that? How can we craft stories and characters that make our audiences laugh when they don’t even feel like smiling?

Humor is hard work, y’all. And there is no way to compose a brief tutorial on how to write it effectively if you aren’t already a naturally funny person. I believe it can be taught, but it’s easier if it’s built in.

So for this moment, let me talk to the funny people.

If people around you already tell you that you’re funny, pay attention. Lean into it. If you can make others laugh without even trying, that’s a gift you need to use.

I used to scorn that gift. I lamented all through my poetry classes in college because I couldn’t write anything meaningful that resonated. The only poetry I’ve ever been good at is limerick. I even had someone tell me that I would never be able to write anything deep because I didn’t have “a poet’s soul,” whatever that meant. That I was too playful, too funny, and too silly to understand the depths of the human spirit. I have feared for most of my creative life that being funny isn’t as important as being deep.

If you have believed that lie, like I did, let’s break those chains right now. Funny doesn’t have to mean shallow. Being funny gives you a unique, powerful key to bringing joy to people who are trapped in darkness. Never underestimate what God can do through someone with a sense of humor.

So, for those of you are already naturally funny, don’t try to be something different. Don’t devalue your sense of humor because someone in the industry told you that depth requires a straight face.

Now, it is important to acknowledge that sometimes you don’t need jokes to make your point. The beauty about humor is that often you don’t need to even tell anyone about it. People can grasp the irony or the funny part without you even pointing it out.

For the naturally funny, you have already mastered timing. What you need to master next is people, and that’s a much more challenging study. Body language. Facial expression. Social awareness. So that you aren’t cracking legitimately funny jokes when the situation doesn’t call for it.

Embrace your sense of humor, but not at the expense of a friend’s feelings. If you’re anything like me or the people in my family, we can make a joke out of anything. That’s how we cope. That’s how we deal with hardship. But not everyone is wired that way.

God gave you your sense of humor to lighten the mood, to bring laughter to dark places, to help calm the tensions between people—not to increase the division we already have.

Laughter is medicine. It refreshes your soul. It keeps you young inside. It alleviates much of the heaviness we feel just surviving everyday life.

Sometimes the simplest truths are the deepest ones.

Help your audience learn to laugh authentically in spite of a terrifying, unknown future. Show them that simple faith in Jesus can overcome any challenge or obstacle, that because of Him we don’t have to be afraid of anything, and we can march forward into the future with our heads held high and our eyes fixed on Him.

That sounds pretty deep to me.

Award-winning author A.C. Williams is a coffee-drinking, sushi-eating, story-telling nerd who loves cats, country living, and all things Japanese. She’d rather be barefoot, and if she isn’t, her socks won’t match. She has authored eight novels, three novellas, three devotional books, and more flash fiction than you can shake a stick at. A senior partner at Uncommon Universes Press, she is passionate about stories and the authors who write them. Learn more about her book coaching and follow her adventures online at www.amycwilliams.com.