What's on your 'Shit List'?

A novel, genuinely effective way of coming up with story ideas.

Workshop alert! Join me and Parker Molloy of The Present Age on May 14 @ 4:30 p.m. Eastern for a workshop on how to launch and grow a successful newsletter. We’ll cover the best platforms for publishing your newsletter, how to find your target audience, how to promote your work, the ins and outs of developing your niche, and so much more! Click here to register (and remember that paid subscribers get 50% off all workshops, including this one!).

A few years ago when I was at The New York Times, I was a guest on a panel for young reporters about finding, generating, and developing story ideas. (Spoiler: There’s no “right” way to do it!) The panel was stacked with veteran reporters from the newsroom, and we talked about all kinds of strategies, from getting out of the office (or home) and walking the Earth, as I love to say, to asking sources what stories you should be covering, to just reading everything humanly possible in the areas you cover.

One of the panelists was a person I consider the best working magazine writer in the country. We got to a section of the panel where we talked about organizing all of one’s story ideas and developing a workflow to manage them, and she chimed in with the most insightful — and revealing and vulnerable — comment of the day:

“I keep a Shit List.”

Soooo … what is a ‘Shit List’?