I have the feeling I've shared this anecdote before, but not having found it in my blogs, I'll tell it (again?):

For a period of years I had a long commute by car that was sometimes shared by others. One of my colleagues grew up somewhere near Hollywood, and like all true Angelinos, he was always working on a screenplay. This guy really put the work in, a lot of people talk about writing, but after months of mentioning his current labor of love, he gave me a finished script to read. It was... okay. It fit all the professional standards of presentation and length and all that. It wasn't any worse than much of the stuff that gets produced. The story was a comedy about ecoterrorism, if I recall correctly. No -- more than that -- it was a rom-com. And it was funny. And hopelessly romantic. And the characters weren't really terrorists.

Then after a few fallow weeks, my friend began fishing for a new idea, and he found a doozy. One morning of our long commute, he laid it out for me. It took him a while just to tell the bare bones of the story because he kept stopping to laugh, and he'd laugh so hard, he couldn't speak. Luckily, *I* was the one who was driving. Otherwise his comedy would have ended with the two of us upside-down in a drainage ditch on the side of a California highway.

Well!

His idea was not funny in the least. In fact, it was gruesome. It was about a man who needed an organ transplant, and he has all sorts of difficulties in getting on the transplant list. At last, the poor man becomes so desperate that he goes to a second- or third-world country and gets involved with criminal elements to hopefully solve his problem. I think he might have had to smuggle some contraband, or had to promise to do so.

[At this point, I exclaim, "Nick, that's not funny; it's horrible!]

And then there is this second thread about a local church needs a new organ -- here he bent over, clutching his stomach and almost had an asthma attack, he was laughing so hard. In fact, he couldn't stop laughing long enough to explain how this church-thread tied in with the story of the man who needed a transplant.

My gasps and protests didn't dissuade him at all -- they only made him laugh even more. I have to stress that my friend is a normal person, with no kinks, and no strange dark side. He's a very positive, happy person. Strangely, though, he couldn't see what I saw.

Now I find myself in a similar situation. I had an idea for a story that I found cute, funny -- maybe even hilarious -- but as I begin to work on it, I find myself shocked and dumbfounded to realize that the lives of the characters are more SAD than funny. It's such an odd reversal that I'm actually shocked. I don't know whether I can lard the plot with humor, or whether I even should.

I'm wondering whether something similar has happened to anyone else out there. I'm not really asking for advice, just wanting to compare experiences, particularly if you came out on the other side of such a thing.

thanks,

Kaleigh Way