Puns and Word Play
Making fighting run
If language were a window, then thoughts would be the structure, and words the pane of glass. To focus on the meaning of a word, you need to look through the pane of glass to what lies beyond. When engaging with puns and word play, it’s the pane of glass itself we’re looking at primarily.
Puns and word play depend on cultivating a good ear for a pun, fast mental and verbal reflexes, and an imaginative zany quirkiness. This exercise is designed to hone some if not all of these abilities by encouraging you to pinpoint exactly what makes a word pun ‘punny’.
Puns and word play are the themes for this month’s writing course and competition. You’re invited to take inspiration from Carol Michelon’s illustration for the section entitled Puns and Word Play in my forthcoming book, Master the Art and Craft of Writing. Your task is to come up with a response to her artwork. Your response should be contained within the boundary of an A4 page, and should not only include but focus largely on puns and word play.
As this is both a course and a competition, here are a couple of exercises chosen from the book to help you out.
Playful pairings
Make a list of word pairs that are spoken one way when joined, and another way when separated.
Example
Crybaby – Cry baby
Lookout – look out
Work out – workout
Hang out – hangout
Voidhound – Void hound
Make up – makeup
Pinning down the pun
Choose a word pair from the list you came up with in the above exercise. Play with the difference – write a poem, or a story in which the difference in a word pair leads to a misunderstanding that leads to a catastrophe that leads to a very funny situation.
Example
“Kyle, look! A jellyfish!” Kyle’s sister Jemma called from the beach.
Kyle had been sitting on the beach for hours and nothing interesting had happened. The teen sat up out of his beach chair and walked over to his sister. She pointed to an almost clear blob on the ground. Kyle raised an eyebrow. He reached down and grabbed the blob.
“Kyle, wait what are you-” Jemma was cut off as Kyle took a small bite out of the top of the blob.
“KYLE!” Jemma shrieked.
Kyle made a face and dropped the blob. “EWWW! That tasted disquiesting!”
“You're not supposed to eat it!” Jemma yelled, holding back laughter.
“YOU SAID IT WAS MADE OF JELLY.”
“Kyle—” Jemma cut herself off with laughter. “Kyle, I meant it’s called a ‘Jellyfish’. It's not actually a fish made of jelly.”
“Awww,” Kyle said, slightly disappointed, then adding, “I was hungry.”
“Let’s go get something to eat, then,” Jemma said, walking away from the jellyfish on the ground. “But you better believe I'm telling Dave about this when we get home.”
“Jemma, wait no! You can’t just embarrass me in front of my best friend ...”
Jemma just giggled, walking off the beach, followed by her dishevelled brother.
Allita and Leon
This month’s task, once again, is to come up with a response to Carol’s artwork featured above. Your response should be contained within the boundary of an A4 page, and should not only include but focus largely on puns and word play.
Submit an entry and you could be the lucky winner of a $10 Amazon gift voucher. The first fifty entrants will receive a free copy of my forthcoming book, Master the Art and Craft of Writing, and every entrant will receive a free sampler of writing exercises. What do you have to lose?
Full rules here.
Deadline: Midnight on Sunday 25th December 2022 BST
Upload your submissions here and share them on social media with the hashtags #unknownstoryteller #carolmichelon #leonconrad #artandcraftofwriting
This Course and Competition is part of The Unknown Storyteller Project, focusing on the art and craft of how to tell a story; Master the Art and Craft of Writing is the counterpart to Story and Structure: A complete guide, a Firebird Award winner, NAA Gold Award winner; Readers’ Choice Book Awards Bronze Award Winner; INA Book of the Year Award Finalist; shortlisted for The People’s Book Prize. The book explains how to structure the story you want to tell in the first place and will help you shape great stories to tell.
With a breathtakingly simple and yet profound handful of symbols, Conrad has created a flexible and precise system for analyzing the inner structure of stories. With this lens he lays bare the absolute essence of all the imaginable story forms, from fairy tales and quest stories to tragedies, riddles and koans. It's a powerful tool for storytellers and scholars and will change forever how you view the simple but profound act of saying “Once upon a time..”
Christopher Vogler, author of The Writer’s Journey