By Brendan O’Meara
Nice to have Louisa Thomas back on the show to talk about profile writing, teaching, and kickers. Louisa is a staff writer for The New Yorker and one of my “appointment reading” writers: I see her byline, I make a date with it.
In this episode we talk about a profile she wrote on Nikola Jokic, perhaps the best player in the NBA. In talking about kickers, we riff on her column about the ennui of the Oakland Athletics and a smattering of other kickers. She says she’s not good at them and credits her editor more than herself, but I think she’s just being modest.
Louisa also is the author of the brilliantly biography Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams and a co-editor of Losers: Dispatches from the Other Side of the Scoreboard.
TL;DL: On Kickers (TK)
Parting Shot: The Perils of Mainlining Criticism
Waiting on a final batch of edits and I think I’ve addressed what needs to be addressed. What ends up happening when I get a new batch of notes is I mainline them. Just scroll until I hit a comment … and they are universally bad, and by bad I mean a shortcoming I must address lest the book get shredded by an astute reviewer. I just picture Kathryn Schulz of The New Yorker getting ahold of this book and crushing it.
But what ends up happening is you mainline enough of the criticism and it’s not unlike eating an entire Family Size back of Sweet Chili Doritos. You feel like shit after. You’re like, “Fuck, I’m terrible at this and nobody will read this and Kathryn Schulz is gonna crush it.”
Then I go for a 15-minute walk out in the neighborhood, something I like to do every 60-90 minutes, anyway. Then I return and address the first note as best I can. But what’s happening is the only notes are from the weak and shitty parts that need help. There are no notes for what’s good, there’s no, “I really like what you did here.” Or, “This is a really cracking sentence.” There’s none of that. So, in rare moments of confidence and assuredness you remind yourself, OK, if there are no notes, the assumption is that it’s good. The “bad notes” are there to get leveled up to the rest … at least that’s the hope.
At some point, you realize you’re better off with a coach, not a cheerleader. What my brilliant, kind, and generous editor is doing is breaking out the game tape and hitting play, pause, rewind, play, pause, rewind, and saying “If we’re gonna win, we need to fix this otherwise we’re gonna get shredded by Kathryn Schulz.”
Bill Belichick almost never complimented Tom Brady. I’m not saying that’s the right thing to do, but they established that coaching was better than cheerleading. I’ve chosen to view the criticism through that rubric. No notes means we’re not taking on negative plays, we’re making progress. Notes aren’t there to make me feel like shit, it’s to make a good book great. So stay wild, CNFers, and if you can’t do, interview, see ya!
