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.)

The Word Counts of Some Popular YA Novels

We often go around thinking that fat, thick books with huge word counts are the best. But the thing is, that thick book that you see in a bookstore may actually contain fewer words than you think. For example, Twilight is around 120,000 words. I won't mention the Harry Potter or Inheritance series, because Harry Potter breaks the rules as it's so popular and hence word count doesn't matter, and Christopher Paolini could shave off 200 or 300 pages off of any of his Inheritance books and they'd still tell the same basic story.

But anyone, here, I'm going to go to a page in various YA books, count the number of words on one page full of text, and then multiply it with the number of pages. The result will probably be higher than the actual number, because I'm not considering the fact that pages that end when a chapter ends and begin with the beginning of a chapter have less words since the chapter name is usually spelt out, but still, as estimated word count is higher anyway, and that's what we're calculating, so these are a bit higher than normal.

1. Goosebumps: Escape From Horrorland- I know this book isn't technically YA and more qualifies as middle age, but I decided that I'd mention it anyway. But, as you're probably thinking, the Goosebumps books are usually pretty thin anyway.
Words per page: 120
Number of pages: 132
Approximate Word Count:  15,840
And another thing, R. L. Stine writes over hundreds of books in a series, so a low word count is actually acceptable.

2. Animorphs: The Revelation- Another book that's pretty thin, and it's part of a series of over fifty books, and each book was written in under a month anyway.
Words per page: 193
Number of pages: 136
Approximate Word Count: 26,248

But let's get on to some of those thicker books that you might see.

3. Sir Thursday, Fourth Book in the Keys to the Kingdom Series- Now, this book is actually the second largest of the series, with only Drowned Wednesday being thicker, but if you've seen it in your local bookstore, you'll notice that it's one of those books that make you think, 'Wow. What a big book.' Well, let's see exactly how many words it seems to have.
Words per page: Around 240 on the pages with large amounts of text.
Number of pages: 343
Approximate Word Count: 82,320
Do note that this is probably higher than what it actually is. Also note that this book is the fourth in a series by a well-established writer, and also that it is a fantasy novel, which generally adds around 14-20,000 words to any story anyway.

4. Gregor the Overlander, First Book in the Underland Chronicles: Some of you may know this book's author a bit better than the book: Suzanne Collins, the same person who wrote The Hunger Games trilogy.
This is book is also pretty large, though not as much as Sir Thursday.
Words per page: 200
Number of pages: 310
Approximate Word Count: 62,000
This is a debut novel, so something that you might want tot keep in mind.

So that's that for now. Please don't take any of the above values too literally. The point of this blog is to show that not necessarily all YA books you see have larger than life word counts. The fact is that an average of 55-65,000 words is probably a good choice. Of course, there are always exceptions, and if you think your longer novel is worth it with each word being important, than, well go for it. Unless a publisher tells you to trim it down so it can be published. In that case, cut it until it matches their standards.

The thing is, don't write a long novel just for the sake of writing a longer novel. That's the thing that you want to avoid, which is what this post is about.

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.