(adapted from her Interview with Working Stiffs, published online November 2000)

It's always wonderful and strange to me that people think of my writing as "humorous", because I don't really think of myself as a funny person. I was never class clown, and while I can occasionally make people laugh, it isn't something that I'm particularly conscious of in my everyday life. But while I don't think of myself as funny, I am very, very aware of trying to be funny, all the damn time.

When I sit down to write a story, I can't honestly say that I'm thinking: "My God, this thing is going to be hysterical!" (all right, sometimes). It all depends on mood, and humor is actually the most difficult thing to write consistently, as I have to be in just the right state of mind for it to flow naturally and not sound forced. This is why I tend to write one funny story, followed by a half-dozen angst-fests. There was a period, when I wrote "Ship Building", "The 36th" and "Grand Seven" one right after another, when I wouldn't have known funny had it walked up and smacked me on the ass. I just wasn't in a humorous mood, for about six months. I sort of picture myself sitting in a darkened room and glaring a lot.

Even when everything's working, funny stories can take weeks for me to write. When I was working, and writing a lot on the side (which may be why I'm no longer working, but that's another story), I started on "Poconos" and it took me nearly two months to finish it. Work kept intruding and just sucking all the humor out of my day... On the other hand, I wrote "Butt, Montana" in a day, because I was feeling frisky and it flowed.

"Untitled Case File" is the quintessential example to me of my "funny" stories, both because of how well it turned out, and in terms of the effort it took to get it that way. It started out as a dream that was so vivid and so monumentally self-absorbed that I actually woke myself up laughing. I sat down in the morning determined to capture that mood and banged out about three pages. Which I then reread and decided were total, absolute crap and not even remotely humorous. One of those moments where you find yourself thinking: "How on earth did I become so egotistical as to think anyone would want to read one of my dreams?" However, I'm just self-aware enough to recognize that I'm not always on target about my own work, so I sent it in to the folks on YesVirginia and asked for their opinion. They all stated that it was quite silly, and I should keep going. It took another two weeks to get through it, one scene at a time, writing a bit and then stopping the second the Muse departed.

When I stop maniacally giggling to myself over something I've just written, it's time to call it quits. Writing an angsty piece, if a section is difficult, I'll just plow on through to the other side. But with humor, you either have it, or you don't. If it's not there, I quit for the day and come back to it when I'm fresh.

One of the first things anyone setting out to write humorously worries about is whether or not what they think is funny will actually amuse other people. This isn't really worth stressing over. If you really don't think you're funny, send a passage to some friends and see what they think. All humor is grossly subjective. Call it the "Something About Mary" syndrome. I went to see it with my husband and my best friend. My husband thought it was the worst thing he'd ever seen and spent about ten minutes in the bathroom right in the middle of the show thinking: "will they notice if I just don't come back?" I thought it was mildly amusing. My best friend laughed so hard she practically choked to death on her popcorn.

It's always astonishing to me how something that I find hysterically funny in my own work won't get a whisper of feedback, but a line that I never even noticed gets fifty letters quoting it back to me with smiley faces afterward. I love those moments, don't get me wrong, but they're always a surprise. I honestly thought that no one would even read "Untitled Case File" (I mostly avoid labeling something primarily as "Humor" for that very reason) and even then I didn't think people would like it. It's by far the most successful thing I've ever written, judging by feedback, so that just shows you how much I know about my own writing. When you're writing, think like Abe Lincoln. You can't please all of the people, all of the time, but you can probably make a few people snork, sometimes.

One of the key things in writing humor is knowing when a situation is able to absorb the humor, and when it isn't. Nothing kills the mood of a piece faster than Mulder throwing off some cheap remark in the middle of a sex scene set, say, immediately after "Memento Mori". "Never Again" Scully doesn't find sex funny. "Bad Blood" Scully does. It's all about timing. Since I rarely write pure PWP pieces, I just go with what the rest of the piece is telling me to do. "The Airport" has funny moments before, during and after the sex scene because despite the portentousness of their first time, we all know that they would never, ever do it in the booth of the Chicago O'Hare Airport Chili's restaurant. So it's ok to be funny, because the whole piece is a throw-away, a fantasy. No one is laughing during the sex scene I wrote for "Ship Building" because the arc of the story is deadly serious.

When well written, humor should be something readers can identify with, even if they've never been in that exact situation themselves (this goes for all writing, actually). Readers love to see characters in situations that seem almost unmanageable, and then watch them get through it without collapsing. It gives us hope that if we were ever, say, alone with the six-year unrequited love of our lives in a booth in the Chicago O'Hare Airport Chili's restaurant and this love object suddenly made a blatant pass at us, we'd know what to do. And even if, like Mulder, we had absolutely no friggin' clue how to handle it, things would eventually work out in our favor and we would, right there in the airport at two-thirty in the morning, get laid.

This is what makes humor and sex such a powerful combination. With humor and romance (because this is a bit different from humor and smut) I think this is because love generally manages to obliterate our ability to laugh at ourselves, which in turn makes us enormously funny to other people. Mulder and Scully in love are funny precisely because they are foolish and sweet. And because love does this to everyone, at some point or another, we identify with it when it happens to fictional characters we care about. I think Mulder is particularly amusing when he's in love. There's a goofy, shaggy quality about him when he's trying to suck up to Scully that's easy to capitalize on. Scully gets very serious and self-absorbed, which is also great material. And they're both so unbelievably blind to each other. I'm not sure every set of fictional characters is like this. I can't imagine writing hysterically funny fanfic about Captain Picard and Beverly Crusher's first time, for instance, though I probably would have tried if I'd known it existed at the time. Now I'm sure I'll get multiple e-mails from people who've written very funny ST:TNG stories.

Smut and humor work well because sex is a truly embarrassing, ridiculous thing, and reading about it is even crazier. Some small part of our brain kicks in during the smuttiest bits and whispers: "What the hell are you doing? This is porn, porn!" At least mine does. And that's funny to me, and indicative of the way we, as rational animals, tend to approach sex. Humor diffuses the intensely personal and confessional nature of sex and lets us relax enough to enjoy it, even if all were doing is reading about it.

So how do I attempt to weave humor and sex together seamlessly, without pulling the reader out of the story with every joke? Simply, I try to make things funny without costing the characters their dignity. I'm not a fan of humor that saps the characters, that debases them and makes them small. Sometimes I find myself wincing when reading other fic because Mulder (more often than not, though Scully is sometimes a victim too) is portrayed as this bumbling fool for comedy, someone Scully would laugh at, rather than love. Sex makes you vulnerable, and neither of these characters likes to be vulnerable. So I try to give them moments of self-effacing humor where they realize, much to their horror, that they are about to become completely intimate with someone they're madly in love with and desperate to impress. We all know that moment where we're suddenly aware of just how... squidgy and easily embarrassing sex can be. But I also let them love each other in their wonderful, dramatic and passionate way. Too much humor robs the situation of any reality, too little and you've got these stone-faced statues fornicating. Even in my more serious stories, I try to make sex a wondrous, exciting and loving thing, because I think that's how the characters have been presented to us.

In my own, non-XF work, that's also how I write sex. We all have enough bad, stupid, angry, pitiful and manipulative sex in our own lives. I don't particularly want to read about it. I don't write stories where the characters are having wild sex in totally unrealistic ways, either. I want it to feel real, even when the setting (an airport bar) isn't somewhere you'd expect.

Still, there's no magic formula for this. I can't tell you exactly how I write humorously. My general observation has been that we're all capable of being amusing. Learning to write for your audience, not for yourself, is an important part of the process, I think. I used to write stories for my best friend, and she liked them to be funny. Again, one of the most important things to remember is that not everyone will laugh at everything you think is hysterical. But someone, at some point, will laugh at some of it if you just take the chance. To be honest, I don't see how people can avoid writing funny stories about Mulder and Scully. "Bad Blood" has got to be one of the funniest hours of television I've ever seen. I like long, angst-ridden pieces, but balance is good, and the XF has always understood that. I guess I just figure I'm writing in character, most of the time.

Read the rest of Jess's interview here.