Inserting Humour Into Your Story

Roald Dahl once said "You can write about anything for children as long as you've got humour."

This might be bit off the point, but I never found his books to be especially funny. Sure, they were all great, but there wasn't even a single moment in them in which I even giggled a little. Still, they were the best.

But coming to the point though, you're probably going to find a touch of humor in all YA books, and in some adult books as well. Unless what you're writing is a very serious story, (even in very serious stories humour can find its place once in a while) you'll probably want to insert some jokes or funny moments to engage your readers.

Now, there's one thing though: How to make your book funny? While there are no set rules, you can learn a lot by reading books that are funny (like Artemis Fowl for example). Some ideas are:

1. Use a comic relief character. While it's probably going to look overly cliche if you have someone who just exists to make things look funny, you can insert that as a trait in one of your characters.

2. Have one of your characters, maybe even the main one, have some sort of interesting quirk. Even the most serious of people have their own oddities.

3. Maybe you don't want to make any of your characters funny. Then you can turn some of the situations they get into downright bizarre.

4. Another thing you might want to try is describing people in an odd way. (The Artemis Fowl books are a good example of this. If you've read them, you probably know how Eoin Colfer describes a whole lot of things.)

But do remember one thing: Humour is a very subjective thing. It varies from person to person. What you may think is laugh-out-loud funny may just get an odd look from someone else. This is true about writing in general too, what one reader might find interesting, would be annoying to another. (But there are some things that in general, all readers will enjoy. Experiment. That's the only way you'll find out.)

Difference Between Children's, Middle-Grade and Young Adult

Because you're a teen writer, I'm going to assume that you're probably not going to write for adults. So, you need to know your categories, and this is what this page is about. Remember, all word counts mentioned are estimated word counts.
So, the first category is Children's. These involve mainly picture books and the word count doesn't go over three thousand. I can't give you much advice on these, because your reputation and luck are a bit more important than your writing skills.
Middle grade is for kids up to the age of 10 or 11. The word counts usually falls in the range 20-30 thousand.
Finally, we have young adult novels. This is the category that I'm going to be covering in detail, because if you're a teen writer, I'm guessing that you're writing a novel for teens. (Most probably.) This is also the most general category and the one which is a bit confusing with word count.
Technically, this category involves people in the ages group 12 to 17, so as you can expect, there's a lot of variety on what to write and how long.
Generally, the word count is suggested to be between 50,000-65,000. But the thing is that that's very general. There are lots of exceptions, and I've seen young adult (often abbreviated to YA) novels sell that have word counts up to 80,000. Some of the sci-fi and fantasy ones even go to the 100,000 word range.
There are a lot of diverse opinions on this issue. What I'm going to say is that it probably depends on your target age group. If your book is targeted more towards 12-14 year olds, then you can expect the word count to be a bit lower than one targeted towards 15-16 year olds. Generally, you can add around 15,000 to the expected word count for any target audience if the theme is science fiction or fantasy, because they involve intensive world building.
I'd say that you should first try to write down your whole book. If you're getting a word count of over 100k, you might want to revise it a little bit. Unfortunately (or fortunately), there's no very strict range that you should tailor your book to. It's kind of something that you'll just have to go with your gut on.