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Hello friends! First, and I’m sure you’re sick of hearing it at this point: If you haven’t yet, go out and vote. Yeah, yeah, I know we all already know this, but make sure you’re on top of it today with a plan. Go go go!
Today we’re talking about great stories. A while back I hosted a workshop with the inimitable Emily Stewart of Business Insider about coming up with better story ideas, a recording of which you can access here. I’ve been turning something over in my head that we talked a lot about: Nobody really comes up with great story ideas fully formed right out of the gate; rather, they sort of emerge or present themselves after diving into the reporting.
I know this seems axiomatic, but, at least for me, hearing that from Emily, who I consider one of the most original reporters around, really drove the idea home. It’s easy and natural to read something truly unique and wonder why you didn’t think of it first, but odds are the person who wrote it didn’t really think of the finished version all at once. Sure, it happens, but it’s not the standard. That brilliant story developed over the course of rigorous, time-consuming reporting and research, and may not have even been clear until far, far along in the process. I kept asking Emily about her secret sauce for coming up with her incredible story concepts, but usually we kept coming back to the same answer: They weren’t incredible at conception, they became incredible long after the concepts first popped up and after a ton of work went into them.
Take, for example, Emily’s gangbusters story about the cloud icon of doom, which we talked about in that workshop. The story — a wholly unique look at how weather apps impact local businesses — easily could have been a single-serving meteorology story; local-business story; economy story; “app” story; or any number of slimmed-down variations. Which would have been perfectly serviceable! Nothing wrong with those stories! But what started as Emily hearing some complaints about weather apps at the beach turned into a story that blended all of the above into a masterclass in following the reporting. As Emily told us,
I pitched this story last summer and got a ‘no’ on it. I spend a lot of time in the Rockaways here in New York City at the beach. It’s a beach town, very summer-focused. You started to hear people say: ‘The stupid weather app says it's going to rain, so people aren't going to come out, and it's really only going to rain for 10 minutes, or it rained at 3:00 a.m.’
Last year, I started reporting it, but we were going in much more of a meteorology direction, and we just dropped it. Then, something happened to my editor where this exact thing happened to him, a decision was made based on the app, and he was like, ‘Wait a minute, I'm not making this up.’ And then we were off to the races.
The end result was one of, in this editor’s humble opinion, the best stories of the summer, and something that ended very differently from how it started.
I’m talking about this today because it’s one of the most common questions I get in basically every workshop I run — “How do I come up with better story ideas?” or some such — and it’s worth remembering that “coming up” with stellar stories isn’t really a thing. Those stories are the result of relentless pursuit and sharp-eyed reporting and observation. Even the blandest of ideas — a weather story during the summer, for example — can potentially turn into something truly wonderful and insightful.
So the next time you’re drawing blanks or wondering where your opus is, take a step back and put in the time to find it. The germ of it is probably somewhere in your notes or ideas stash; you just have to bring it out and let it grow.
Have a wonderful week!
Oh, a few other things …
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