Sep 11

Posted by Tom Baker

Tokai University Professor and JET alum Charles Kowalski will be the host of this year’s Japan Writers Conference, at his university’s Shonan Campus in Hiratsuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, on Oct 15-16.

He is the author of the Japan-based middle-grade fantasy Simon Grey and the March of a Hundred Ghosts, and the contemporary thrillers Mind Virus and The Devil’s Son. He has won the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold Award, and has been a finalist for the Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award, the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Association Literary Award, and the Adventure Writers Grandmaster Award.

This year’s Japan Writers Conference will feature approximately 27 different sessions on various aspects of the writing life, one of which will be presented by Charles himself. Here’s the official description:

Charles Kowalski
The Magic of Humor
Craft Workshop
Fiction, Nonfiction


What wizardry lies in writing magical symbols that make anyone who looks at them fall into helpless laughter? Here, we explore ways to infuse writing with laugh-out-loud humor, such as combining divergent situations to make a comic premise, creating comic characters, and running dialogue and narration through “funny filters.”

Of all the ways to make people laugh, one of the hardest is through the written word. This workshop will present several techniques for infusing writing with laugh-out-loud humor, including:

How humor works by subverting expectations and creating new ones
How to combine disparate situations for comic effect
How to run ordinary dialogue and narration through “funny filters”
How to create comic characters using archetypes, quirks, and comical situations


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