How can you bring laughter into your books regardless of genre? What are the challenges of writing a novel after an award-winning career as a comedy writer for TV and radio? Dave Cohen shares his lessons learned in this interview.

In the intro, how to keep a career fresh over multiple books [Author Nation Podcast]; Best practices of successful indie authors [Draft2Digital];
Director James Cameron joins the board of Stability AI [Hollywood Reporter];
Google NotebookLM; Full audio expanding snippet; Photos from Ely Cathedral; Blood Vintage.

This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"></figure>

Dave Cohen is a multi-award-winning BBC comedy writer who has worked on shows like Horrible Histories, as well as a comedy novelist, podcaster, and author of nonfiction. His latest book is Funny Up Your Fiction: How to Add Light, Shade, and Laughs to Your Novel.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• The shift from writing for TV to self-publishing novels





• Why comedy is important for writers





• Writing for individual sense of humour vs. broader appeal





• Constructing characters that readers will find funny





• Avoiding cliches in comedy





• Creating covers for comic novels based on genre crossovers





• Cancel culture and its affect on writing humour





• Tips for keeping a positive mindset and creating opportunities

You can find Dave at DaveCohen.org.uk.

Transcript of Interview with Dave Cohen

Joanna: Dave Cohen is a multi-award-winning BBC comedy writer who has worked on shows like Horrible Histories, as well as a comedy novelist, podcaster, and author of nonfiction. His latest book is How to Write a Funny Novel. So welcome to the show, Dave.

Dave: Hi. Thanks very much for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you today. First up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into books and self-publishing after focusing more on writing for screen and performance in previous decades.

Dave: Well, I'd always wanted to be a novelist, really since I was a teenager, but I got a little bit distracted on the way. I happened to spend 10 years as a stand-up comedian, and that was followed by about 20 years of writing for comedy for TV and radio.

It was never quite the right time to start that novel writing career. Then I got to my 59th birthday, this was in 2017, and I finally thought, well, this is the time that I decide I have to write the novel now. I have to do it now and be damned.

So I did, and I wrote my first novel. I was very pleased, and I got it all ready to send off to agents. I finished it and it was ready March 2020, at which point COVID happened.

Every one of my comedy friends and colleagues, stand-up comedians, writers, all of the people who are far more successful than me, were suddenly out of work. So they had to think, “What am I going to do next? I'll write a book.”

So I suddenly thought, ah, right, my book isn't going to get anywhere with an agent, I might as well self-publish. That's the next part of the journey, and that's how I've ended up here now.

Joanna: Just go into that bit more then because obviously working a couple of decades with the BBC—which if people don't know, as there's a lot of people in America, it's probably the most traditional of traditional media you could possibly imagine.

How did you break out of the opinion of the traditional media around self-publishing?

I mean, things have obviously changed since I self-published back in 2007, but how did you get around that?

Dave: Well, I mean, first of all, I would say people think of the BBC as this sort of very respectable giant monolith, but actually it's loads and loads of different quirky little places.

So it sounds great to say writing for the BBC, but a lot of that was writing for BBC Radio, which was about five people in a broom cupboard. Also children's TV, which is only three people in a smaller cupboard.

So the kind of pioneering way of the BBC is it's able to make things despite this sort of reputation as this very fusty corporation, rather than because of it. I think that's very much the kind of spirit that I found fairly straightforwardly, actually.

That's one of the things that was fairly easy to come to from being in the world of TV writing, was moving away from the BBC that's just full of people who just do it and do it for love. So from that point of view, it was a fairly straightforward move.

I think that the harder move was coming from being somebody who was a professional writer and was used to a process, that often ended up in rejection, but it was still a process anyway. So moving from that to a situation, the jungle, I suppose, of self-publishing, where it's free for all.

Joanna: Yes, and there are obviously pros and cons in that. I mean, you mentioned your previous writing, and one of the things you say in the book is that much of it was quite short, lyrics and shorter things.

What were the challenges in the craft of writing a full novel after very different creativity in the past?

Dave: Well, this probably sounds quite stupid, but it's actually true. The number of words, indeed, is quite a challenge because a single joke can be four words long.

There's a great comedian, Tim Vine, a British comedian, and he had a joke which went, “Velcro, what a rip off.” That's a joke he did that's four words long. So the idea is, oh, what do I do? Do I have to write 20,000 four-word jokes?

Obviously, the numbers thing is part of the issue. Like a half-hour sitcom is about 4000 words long. To develop a new idea for a sitcom and to write a pilot script for one, it's quite a lot of work.

It's almost not quite as much work as developing a novel, a whole novel, but it's months of playing with stuff and thinking of things. So the words was the first thing, but then the next problem was going to the other extreme.

It was like, aha! I can write as much as I want now. So you'd end up overwriting. The sky wasn't just blue, it was a pastel blue with the clouds breezing along. You go, oh, I can just do this. Whereas when you're writing a script, you just have to get straight to the point. “Character knocks on door, other character answers, straight into conversation.”

So, yes, one of the main things was overcompensating. That did lead me to another true fact, I think of whatever you're writin