Known Unknowns #4, Guest Post #1: Caissie St.Onge

Hey! Hi! You may remember — this was waaaaaay back on Friday — I posted a piece about knowing when things are done. In that piece, I mentioned that I was going to be cajoling people from other creative avenues (Comedy Street, Television Parkway, etc.) to lend their perspectives on done-ness. Incredibly enough, it worked, and now I’ll be posting these all week, one per day, in addition to my regular Tuesday and Friday pieces. Enjoy!

Caissie St.Onge, Television Comedy Writer/Producer; Author

In the kind of TV writing that I have done in my career, it’s “one and done.” When you’re writing jokes, you’re usually just generating a whole bunch of them for some host to pick and choose from and deliver, almost always just a few hours later on the very day you’ve written them. It doesn’t leave a lot of time for finessing or revising. Or thoughtfulness. The good news is that joke writing is almost mathematical in its precision, and you do get to a point where you can tell if a joke will work or if it’s a stinker. It’s up to you to decide if you want to spend time polishing a turd or if you just want to move on to a different conceit or a new topic altogether. If you fell in love with every line you wrote and got all invested in it emotionally, I’m not sure how you’d survive even a day.

When I first started writing jokes, a wise mentor said, “If they use one out of every ten, you’re killing it.” I didn’t know any better at the time, so I took his word for it and I’ve believed it ever since. If ten percent of my work doesn’t get thrown out, I’m happy. And if for some reason my turd-detector was off, and that one joke of mine that made it to the show doesn’t get a laugh, I can always fall back on blaming how it was delivered or on the host’s poor judgment in choosing that joke in the first place when I had, like, so many other jokes on that page that were way funnier!

When I wrote my first Young Adult novel, it was ye olde whirlwind. I had an idea and wrote the entire thing very quickly, probably a side-effect of my TV joke-writing roots and constant slavery to a ticking stopwatch always inching closer to “showtime”. (My agent still laughs at how fast I turned in that first draft and the goofy irony is that the whole time I was feeling like it was taking me FOREVER to finish and I kept apologizing for being so slow. Here’s a helpful tidbit based on my experience: It takes a lot longer to write a book than it does to write a page of monologue jokes!) When I finally wrapped up the last chapter, I sent that manuscript off within seconds. And just like I would have thrown down a page of jokes and run back to my desk to start writing more for the next day, I mentally moved on to the next thing. I was done! However, a few weeks later, when two different publishers made bids on the novel, I realized very quickly that I wasn’t done at all. Both publishers had notes that they wanted me to address, so regardless of who I sold it to, I wasn’t getting out of revising it. I got my first real taste of grownup editing and I both loved it and hated it. I hated it because I had to really examine my weaknesses as a writer and I loved it because I’d never before had the experience of being able to almost turn back the clock on my writing and fix the things that could have been stronger before sending it out to the world to succeed or fail.

Between the two different types of writing that I have been lucky enough to make a go of, I feel like they’ve left me with a pretty healthy idea of what “doneness” means to me. I will never be the kind of person who will just toil away tweaking and reworking in perpetuity, never feeling finished, because I don’t believe that anything I create could be, or is even meant to be, perfect. Anything I put out is just a reflection of what I’m thinking and feeling at a particular moment, and while a book or a TV show with my name on it may be preserved, unchangeable, in amber forever, I’m not. I can move on and do something new every time.

Caissie St.Onge is the author of the Young Adult novel Jane Jones: Worst Vampire Ever, published in 2011 by Random House/Ember. She has been a writer/producer for many television comedy shows, including Best Week Ever with Paul F. Tompkins. She is currently a producer on Bravo’s hit nighttime talk show, Watch What Happens: Live. 

Tomorrow! Onion editor and standup comedian Joe Randazzo!