Not long ago in a writing workshop, a colleague offered to read a personal essay I had written about a difficult life experience. My kind friend reported back that he felt as if I was dragging him, sad and depressed, to the abysmal end of the story.

“I don’t want to feel as if I’m being forced to feel bad,” he said. “Where’s your sense of humor? And you’re not having any fun, either.”

Humor? I didn’t see anything funny about the story of my trip to Washington, D.C., to see my husband’s name on the Vietnam Memorial for the first time, but maybe I was taking myself a little too seriously. Perhaps Colette, the French writer whose husband locked her in a room to keep her writing, was right when she said that total absence of humor renders life impossible.

Humor in nonfiction writing demands taking a firm, self-confident position about one’s “self” and then flipping the situation upside down. Writer Leigh Anne Jasheway calls this creative misdirection; engaging readers by taking them someplace they don’t expect to go, choosing words and metaphors that make readers giggle without knowing why.

She says a smiling reader wants to read on even if the topic is inherently sad.

Where was my sense of comic relief? Obviously, I had forgotten that humor creates a bond with people and cuts down on tension and anxiety. People need to cry and laugh. Humor fosters a sense of immediacy, a closer personal connection.

There was little to joke about in my essay, but there were some curious ironies in the story that I had not yet discovered even if there was nothing to joke about. As Dorothy Parker said in Writers at Work, “There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”

How could I find my wittiness when I felt like I was climbing a mountain wearing flip-flops? Is there a proven way to access one’s artistic funhouse?

EB White said, “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies.” It turns out that there are some methods in a humorist’s madness.

Comparisons, like using well-chosen metaphors, are one specific approach writers use to create an unexpected smile. Comic essayist David Rakoff, when faced with potential amputation of his left arm and shoulder because of cancer, quipped: “If they remove my left arm, how will I know when I’m having a heart attack?”

Humor in grim situations humanizes the writer and shelters the reader, inviting sympathetic laugher even in humorless territory. A dash of self-deprecation, a small argument with oneself, and honest skepticism are also helpful.

Among Jasheway’s tools for adding a touch of comedy to writing is “The K Rule.” She says that words with the “k” sound (Cadillac, quintuplet, quahog) are perceived as the funniest, along with words with a hard “g” sound (guacamole, gargantuan).

Perhaps I could have said in my essay that the crowds of passengers at Union Station in Washington, D.C., when I arrived to visit the memorial, felt like a kangaroo stampede. Jasheway speculates that much of what makes Americans laugh today has its roots in Yiddish humor and “g” and “k” sounds come the closest.

Readers are subconsciously amused just hearing these sounds.

In “Seven Steps to Better Humor Writing,” Jan Hornung says that whether or not a writer is personally funny is not important and please don’t tell the reader that something is funny. Instead, use descriptions that include all five senses and let the reader discover the funny parts themselves.

Blending description, metaphors, and similes with dialogue is another way to generate humor. For example, “we were wrestling around like two pigs in the mud, only he was enjoying it and I was just getting dirty.”

Now we’re approaching something of which even Mark Twain might approve, or risk a smile.

It was the second part of my friend’s comment that created real concern. He was right. I wasn’t having much fun writing the story about the trip to Washington.

And shouldn’t I be having a little fun if I’m dedicating most of my time to writing? Somehow I had sucked the life out of my story by telling it in a way that was too precious.

My father used to say, “If you can’t fix it, get a bigger hammer.” I dove in and operated on that story with hammer and tongs, glockenspiels and gelatos, and started to have a good time finding my whole self on the page during that difficult time. Finally, at least one of us was enjoying the essay.

Ruth W. Crocker lives in Mystic. She can be reached at ruthwcrocker@gmail.com.