The one easily-identifiable thing that separates one-in-a-million literary talents from "good writers"

Humor. It's humor. The difference between a genius writer and one that's just OK is nothing more than the depth of their humor, even (especially!) when they're writing about terrible things.

The difference between a good writer and a genius is humor—depth and sharpness of humor. Nothing more, nothing less.

Humor makes the entire difference between a good writer and a great one—as is evidenced by, among other things, the fact that the English language has no adequate words for humor. One has to be really, really, really good at writing in order to even describe the CONCEPT, for God’s sake, let alone do it.

Mind you, many great writers have been able to describe humor just fine. Anne Lamott, for instance, calls it “carbonated holiness,” which is just perfect.

However, what I am confident no one can do—not even Anne, not even Shakespeare—is get anywhere close to capturing humor using only what’s available in the storage bin marked WORDS ENGLISH LANGUAGE DONE GOT FOR “FUNNY.”

“Silly,” “slapstick,” “ridiculous”: these are sufficient for—at best—Carrot Top. “Comic,” “waggish,” “jocular,” “jolly”: ditto, but Buzz Killington. “Uproarious,” “riotous”—I’d rather leave the baked-in class neuroses to a competent therapist (or at least some kind of Marxist literary scholar).

“Hilarious”—eh, that one’s okay, but it’s long since overused into toothlessness, and plus, did you know that the Ancient Greek root word hilaros means either “cheerful” or…“prompt and willing”? Which is, like, a narcissist’s definition of humor: “someone willing to laugh immediately and with gusto at all my ‘jokes,’ shoring up my ramshackle self-esteem.”

None of these words get remotely close to humor’s core, is my point. They’re incisive like that one kitchen knife I got for my wedding and haven’t sharpened once in the ensuing 12 years.

The only word that even sort of cuts the concept well is “humor” itself. The descendant of an ancient line—it progenitor one of the oldest words there is, proto-Indo European dʰéǵʰōm, meaning earth—it’s in the same enormous family as human, humus, humble, and humility.

This tracks: humor, real humor, is that which makes us feel our most earthen and grounded when shared. It’s what brings us home to ourselves.

…Which is all beautiful metaphor, but also a dead one, and nobody thinks about dead metaphors at Wal-Mart, Bernice. As in: you can’t bring anyone home to the ancient, tender human fundament from which the word “humor” comes—from which we all come—by just saying the word “humor.” You have to actually do humor to get us there, and you have to do it well.

So how do you do humor well?

Humor is not an easily-teachable skill. That’s another reason it separates the geniuses from the just-OKs on the bookshelf: like all forms of mature intimacy, it’s largely a function of subconscious impulse regulated by well-developed self-understanding. This makes it graspable like the Northern Lights are photographable: not at all, not really; not unless one has some exceptionally powerful and expensive machinery to hand.

Fortunately for you all, however, I’M codependent! Which means I refuse to accept that it’s impossible to teach another adult something they can only learn through the arduous, ongoing process of self-actualization. Which is why I’m about to offer you a bunch of hot tips on how to write humor.

Put another way, I’m hoping to show you the aurora of literary brilliance by photographing it with my metaphorical smartphone. My grainy picture will be a sad, sad reduction of the real thing, but it might be enough to help you sort of know what the real thing looks like, and that might help you recognize it faster when you stumble on it in the wild.

Remember: the literal aurora in the sky isn’t magic; it’s just electrons and protons blowing in from the sun and crashing into our atmosphere, causing more and more beautiful colors the deeper down toward the ground they go.

Ditto literary genius: it’s all just humor—humor which, the more velocity it has and the deeper down to the ground it’s able to go, the more dazzling the display for observers on the ground.

Here come the tips. If you’re capable of executing on these perfectly—I’m not—you won’t just write funny; you’ll write in a way that makes knowledgeable people think, “this person is probably going to win a Nobel Prize in Literature some day.”