CeCe Lyra

Yeah, I really like the exploration of tenderness in humor and how a lot of male comics feel like it needs to be inappropriate and you need to say shitty things about people and, you know, pull them down.

But comedy doesn't have to be that way.

So it was a great take on that.

Yeah, true.

But I did enjoy the punching up at Elon Musk.

I'm not going to lie.

His fair game and that description of him was hilarious.

I really, really enjoyed that.

So a few tricks here that I want to make our listeners aware of.

When you have like...

A lot of people, as you do in a classroom with Jesse, you know, it's difficult for the readers to keep track of people's names if their names are John and Lily and whatever.

And what you do so brilliantly is that Jesse gives all of his students nicknames in his head in the first day of class based on certain things, which is such a brilliant tool to help the reader figure out who all the different characters are.

Yeah.

So what you do brilliantly, and I've realized that it's in a lot of your books, is writing characters who spend a lot of time alone.

And that's really tricky to do because if it was on screen, it would be super boring because you don't have access to their interiority, their emotionality, their psyche.

But on the page, you tend to have the character alone, but they're moving, they're driving, they're doing something.

So can you give us some tricks of the trade there in terms of making that interesting?

Because often on the podcast, we say don't begin with the character alone or don't let the character be alone too much.

Yeah, no, I just took notice of all the times Jesse was alone or someone was alone, but it's still so riveting, you know, because we have access to the psyche.

And I mean, at one point he's driving to see his mother.