Sticking the Landing: On Kickers
November 26, 2024 at 10:00PM
This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
Kickers: you either love them or you hate them. I often can’t wait to see how a writer builds to that moment when they drop that last line, how a brilliantly executed kicker ties the bow tightly around the package.
Louisa Thomas is a staff writer for The New Yorker. She has a weekly sports column for the website and contributes profiles for the main book. Writing columns and profiles are distinctly different modalities that strike different tones. Both invite a tactful kick.
In my conversation with Louisa for episode 430 of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, we talk about kickers—how she hates writing them and how she thinks her way into a piece. She is the author of Louisa: The Extraordinary life of Mrs. Adams. She coedited Losers: Dispatches from the Other Side of the Scoreboard.
This excerpt has been edited for concision and clarity. Subscribe to The Creative Nonfiction Podcast wherever you get your podcasts to hear this conversation—and hundreds of others—in full.
—Brendan O’Meara
Brendan: You go for a punchy sentence at the end, and I always appreciate that. How cognizant are you of that degree of finality in your pieces?
Louisa: I hate writing kickers. I often file “KICKER TK” (kicker to come) with the phrase in all caps because I find them quite difficult and they often come in very late. Either they come to me or my editor, who is really good at kickers. This is one of the reasons I rely on him when I send things in.
For instance, with that A’s column (a story about the moribund Oakland A’s and their dilapidated stadium, “The Kafkaesque Journey of the Oakland A’s”), I’d actually begun the second section with The Metamorphosis. I had tried writing that piece as a parody of The Metamorphosis. I mean, it was like Mad Libs, and I had a lot of fun with it, and then I gave it to a friend, and my friend was like, “Well, if you were able to run this alongside The Metamorphosis it would make sense, but no, you can’t do this.”
I turned it into something much more conventional. I had [the kicker] “Samsa, we learn, has undergone a horrible transformation. He eventually dies of neglect,” higher up, but my editor was the one who identified that as the correct way to end the piece, and he was right. All credit to him. He deserves a lot of credit. We go back and forth on kickers a lot. And I’m learning from him, but, short and punchy is where I want to land because you want to come away with a bit of a punch, the reverberations of that. I do think kickers are really important, especially in a short piece, because at the end of a long piece, you trust it can be magical. It can totally reframe the whole thing for you. But also, at the end of a short piece, you can trust [readers are] probably going to get there. So they’re really important.
We go back and forth on kickers a lot. . . . short and punchy is where I want to land because you want to come away with a bit of a punch, the reverberations of that.
Brendan: How do you work your way into a piece, be it a column or a profile?
Louisa: A column and a profile have different entry points. With my weekly column, it’s all done in a compressed time frame. The entry point to the column is often my deadline. You just have to figure it out in a certain amount of time, and then whatever it’s going to be, it’s going to be. Sometimes, if you’re struggling, you just have to try to have fun with it, like the A’s piece. I thought that was going to be easy—low-hanging fruit, to be honest. And the backstory is: My sister was getting married, so I was going to DC for a wedding, and I wanted to be very much present as a matron of honor. I wanted something that wasn’t going to give me too many fits but it did, because everything gives me fits. I couldn’t figure out a way to be original. And in the end, I’m not sure I was particularly original, but I just wasn’t having enough fun with it, because it’s such a crazy story. That’s how I just kept thinking about it. I kept thinking of the stadium.
The piece is true in that that stadium reminded me of this insect, the opening of The Metamorphosis. I wrote a 2,000-word thing, and that was a lot of fun, and it ended up not working, but that was my way into it. That was my process. And then I was able to settle down and use a lot of the material I had in that piece and turn it into something readable and understandable by people who are not, you know, scanning line by line.
Sometimes it’s more like I have an idea, and I need to think about, well, what’s the lede? And that becomes the way into it, and then how does it develop? I don’t write an outline. I usually write a few notes. I have a document full of research or ideas or thoughts or interviews if I’ve done interviews, and then I just start writing.
For a profile, I block it out a little bit more. I still don’t have an outline, but I have beats I want to hit, and a general sense of structure. What’s sort of unusual is that I do a lot of the planning and even pre-writing in my head. You won’t find it in my notes, because it’s in my head. And I like working that way, because I attend to feelings and sounds more when it’s in my head than when it’s on the page. And it’s easier to stop and say, well, what are you trying to get? What are you trying to do here? Whereas when it’s on the page, I start fiddling with the sentences and I can get distracted. When I’m writing on the page, I focus on the information less than the effects of it. So when it’s in my head, I’m more focused on the effects, probably. My process is very mental.
I used to always do this, and now I don’t so much because I have kids and I have less time. But I used to like to go for a run and think through a piece. Now I do more of that process when I’m in the carpool line, or waiting for the water to boil while I’m making pasta, but I still try to make sure that gets done—that I’m actually spending a lot of time thinking and not just writing. That’s the most important time to me.
Listen to the full conversation below.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/26/kickers-journalism-writing-craft/
via IFTTT
Watch