Thunderstruck: your five-step guide to long-form writing

There I was, a boiled-dry washed-up dried-up hulk, a mere husk of a once-was-news-journalist with nothing to write and nobody to pay me to write it, caught in the middle of a railroad track and I knew there was no turning back, and why? Because nobody reads news, the smug bloggers who blog about writing told me. Because the inverted pyramid, the ingrained habit of putting your best information in the lede, is dead, they said. Long-form is the thing, they said.

To take 300 words of information about a Wi-Fi-enabled light globe and turn it into 5,000 words of long-form masterpiece, I needed to out-Hemingway-Hemingway, and I didn’t know how.

Of course I tried, but old habits die hard. Somehow information kept creeping into the first paragraph and ruining everything. I was desperate, done for, done-and-dusted, face-down in the rolling surf, and then it hit me.

To write long-form, I needed a formula. And I found it, and now I’m going to share it with you:

Thunderstruck, by AC/DC.

1. The solo is the lede

Start with a good dose of nothing, like the Angus Young solo that lasts the first quarter of Thunderstruck. Pyrotechnics without content is the secret to writing without a lede.

Don’t bury the lede: kill it with fire. Abandon it on a country highway. Launch it into the sun. Get rid of it.

Start the article by strutting to the front of the stage and showing off. Bombast the riffs, fire the pyros, let your copy grow a hipster beard of artisanal literary affectations … the passive voice, sentences of inversions confusing, the proper deployment of ellipses …

It’s not an article, it’s a performance.

A cafe opening scene is perfect, a repeatable cliché giving you an easy few hundred words about décor, ambience, staff, crockery, noise, how your interviewee is dressed, and if you’re desperate, the coffee.

An obscure literary reference will prove you’ve read something nobody else has. “Like Philip K Dick, whose most profound insight sits at the geometrical centre of his novel VALIS, he/she didn’t come to the point of the interview until half of our allotted hour had already passed.”

2. Oh, that’s right, the song

The most perfect long-form writing excludes information entirely, but only the best get to write for The New Yorker. Just like that moment when Brian Johnson realises he’s got to screw up his face, screw down his courage, and actually sing the pedestrian lyric they gave him, you’ll have to say something.

The good news is you only need a bare minimum of information — 20 or so words will do — before the next digression.

Name the inevitable celebrity users, and research their attachment to other gadgets: “so it’s no surprise that the Apple Watch-wearing, Fitbit-toting, tech-obsessed Taylor Swift is named among the company’s Kickstarter backers”.

Give the reader something to do: YouTube will yield videos that can be linked, Twitter and Facebook will point to the product’s rapturous reception, tell people about the TEDx talks (you don’t have to watch them yourself), and dip a toe into Reddit.

3. The rhythm section

Even the most devoted long-form hipster has a threshold of boredom somewhere. The rhythm section is there to keep them awake: boom-boom-snare in music, replicated as two long paragraphs and one short, pithy, informative one.

4. Time for a another solo

Just as the actual song only exists to bookend Angus Young’s pyrotechnics, once you’ve told the reader something minimally useful, it’s time to strut again. Get Google Translate to explain that the Germans call the gadget a Kommunikation-radio-lampe or a funklampe, make a pun on the Basque irrati lanpara, whatever comes to hand. Pull out a pop-psych riff about the Wi-Fi lamp “profoundly changing family interactions” , forecast the market out to 2030 (with appropriate authorities to back you up).

And remember, it’s not about the German or the Basque or the pop-psych or the forecast, it’s about the linguistic legerdemain, hipsterish hype, alliterative aspirations, long listicles delimited by commas.

5. Fade out

You’re nearly there: you just need to get to the end. And that bit’s easy.

Thunderstruck ends with a reiteration of the start; so can you. Showcase the riff, take the pith, let off the flash-pots, and grab a full-stop.

For 40 years or so, AC/DC has turned the same song into an album, and the same album into a hit. So, as a long-form writer, can you.