Expectations: I sets them

I've put aside my novel for a bit, to work on re-working an old novella. I want to epub it.

I've been studying structure since the spring so it seems like a good chance to put my learnings to practice in a smaller format, before going back to the novel. So I've reworked the plot to give it, I hope, more tension. And have begun the rewriting process. ...Except it's been a couple pineapple days, so not much progress.

The first thing I'm tackling, in the rewrite, is the promises I make in the first scene. You want to use the first scene to set people's expectations for the kind of story it will be, especially when writing humor. If it's a Sparkling Wit! sort of deal, you want Sparkling Wit! on the first page; and you do NOT want to suddenly introduce low brow humor on page 20. But if it's a Pratfall sort of book, then it needs a pratfall on page one. If it's farce, then gotta start with farce.

For example, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail the first scene shows a knight riding around on an imaginary horse, with coconut sounds for hoofbeats. If you don't think that's funny, then it's a good time to bail on the movie, cause it's perfectly representative of what you're going to get for the next 90 minutes.

And you couldn't introduce that sort of joke halfway through A Fish Called Wanda, cause although Wanda's farcical it still takes place in the real world. It would be jarring, it would turn people off.