How to become a master at creating wordplays?
Puns introduced by authors make a text look witty to a reader. Professional writers skillfully manipulate words and phrases to demonstrate their smartness and, most important, gain the affection of the audience. Personally, I see no other way to create a pun, except by accident. I think so because I am new at writing. Although, I totally understand that experienced ones use this stylistic device intentionally and do not spend hours thinking up a new pun. So my question is: How can I acquire a skill to play on words? What steps should one take to make a pun? Thanks in advance for your help.
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You could try looking at lists of homophones and homonyms. These lists can give you ideas about similar sounding words. However, in the end, you just have to keep practising. Sometimes it does take hours to get a line or a sentence right, whether it contains a pun or not.
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Although, I totally understand that experienced ones... do not spend hours thinking up a new pun.
How do you know that?
Skills take time and practice. Maybe the good writers do spend hours working on puns.
If you want to practice at wordplay, you need to think about the meanings of words, and how they can be looked at obliquely. One exercise I did in high school was to take a list of common clichés and idioms and turn them into questions. For example:
- Where do you buy elbow grease? Does it work better than knee grease? Does it come in cans or squeeze tubes?
- Would a durian fruit by any other name still smell like a four-week-old diaper?
- If a doctor's spouse bought an apple farm, would that be automatic grounds for divorce?
- What if I'm only happy as an oyster? or a shrimp?
and so on. If you do enough of these, it allows you to crack open the language to get at the meanings, and come back through the meanings to choose another word which creates the pun.
- If a pun is the lowest form of wit, is a bun the lowest form of wheat?
- There was a man who entered a local newspaper's pun contest. He sent in ten different puns, in the hope that at least one of the puns would win. Unfortunately, no pun in ten did.
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