What Saturday Night Live taught me about writing

How to write more $&*#ing words in less time

Hi friends,

I am still glowing from the wondrous Journey to Jupiter writing retreat I recently co-led for 16 writers. I’ll say more about that soon, but for now, I’ve got a few announcements and some thoughts on how Saturday Night Live helps me get words down. Thanks, as always, for reading.

Upcoming offerings

• Online craft session alert! Writing Captivating Scenes will get into the nuts and bolts of scene construction. This 90-minute lecture will break down the scene to its basic elements, explore what each element needs to be successful, and discuss how these elements must work together to make the scene shine. The session is October 16, but if you can’t make it live, you’ll get the replay. Register now!

• Story Connection: An Evening of Live Storytelling returns October 24 at the Carrboro ArtsCenter. And hey, Story Connection now has an Instagram account! Please give us a follow. All the details of the show as well as highlights from the class and craft tips will be posted there.

• One of my students is offering a Creative Writing Camp, Oct 7-11 for 3rd-5th graders at Eno Arts Mill in Hillsborough NC, perfect for any creative kid on break that week. I wish I could go!

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Go write some $&*#ing words

I started watching Saturday Night Live when I lived in Iowa City in the mid-2000s, back when Netflix still came on discs. There wasn’t much to open in Iowa City past 9pm besides grocery stores and undergrad bars, and the time zone worked to my advantage—SNL started at 10:30pm and was over by midnight, a perfect Saturday night activity. I curled up on the couch with my partner and our cat, ready to laugh.

Let’s get something on the table right now: Saturday Night Live is not always funny. I think this is one of its greatest strengths and lessons to us writers.

Here’s a rough summary of how an episode of Saturday Night Live is made*: on Monday morning, they have nothing. For six days they pitch, write, refine, and rehearse. Many a sketch is thrown out during the dress rehearsal. By hook or by crook, by 11:30pm (Eastern) on Saturday, they are onstage, in costumes and makeup, performing an hour of material that did not exist at the beginning of the week.

That’s what I think about every time I see a sketch that isn’t that funny. That the performers on my screen—and the unseen hundreds who make the show go—had blank pages six days earlier. SIX DAYS.

Of course not every sketch is going to be hilarious. The real miracle is how much incredibly funny shit they are able to produce in such a short time frame.

You might think the reason they can pull together an episode in less than a week is because they’re just so damn funny. It’s true they’re highly talented, but I can assure you*, 70-90% of what gets tossed around in that week is hot garbage.

The reason SNL can be so funny isn’t because they’re so brilliant they can shit out comedy gold on command. SNL happens—and sometimes makes us pee our pants—because they use the deadline to their advantage.

First, they allow themselves to throw out a LOT of ideas. Zillions. They don’t have time to be precious or perfect. Their experience has taught them that you can’t know what has legs until you say it out loud. And that the more you pitch, the more likely you are to come up with something promising.

They revise. They know that lots of great sketches start as half-baked ideas, that a not-quite-there idea can become outstanding with riffing, feedback, and revision. They also know that great sketches come together after a lot of people contribute to them, sharpening them, making them better.

There’s no ego or holding tightly—they ain’t got time for that shit. If something isn’t working, it doesn’t survive. It gets punched up or thrown out, as soon as possible.

And they don’t take any of it too seriously. They know that if a sketch or show isn’t their best, it’s OK—there will be another one in a week or two. As Roger Federer says in his recent commencement address, it’s only a point. Swing and miss? Life goes on.

On Saturday, the 50th season of SNL debuts. The 50TH SEASON. Fifty fucking years.

As we wait for whatever that episode holds for us—they are working on it RIGHT NOW—I implore you: go to your desk (your chair, your spot in the carpool lane) and write some words. Don’t think for one second if they’re any good. Just write them down and trust that at some point you and your people will make them better than they are now.

Write like you’re on an insane deadline. Like an editor has told you that if you don’t deliver a very shitty first draft to them by Saturday night, they won’t publish your book.

And if you need encouragement, sure, you can go back and watch the funny sketches, but how about revisiting the not quites? While you sit there, not laughing, think about how freeing it must be to make something sort of okay, put it on national television, and wake up the next day to the rest of your life. Think about how much better it feels to have made something meh than to have made nothing at all.

Keep writing, friends.

*Have I been in the SNL writers’ room? No I have not. Have I read extensively on how the show is put together? Not really. Have I based these theories on decades of making art and helping others make art? Yes, yes I have.