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.”

Broadly speaking, it’s exactly what it sounds like: a list of every story idea that pops into your head, no matter how good or bad it is — hence the shit part. Hers was nothing fancy, just a Google Sheet she constantly updated, but it was an enormous repository of all the ideas that came to mind. On her beat, off her beat, a type of storytelling she wasn’t used to, a video, a podcast, an explainer … no matter what, she kept track of it all.

But the reason she kept writing down ideas, even the ones she knew were bad, was that it kept her brain thinking, and it helped her get in the habit of looking for stories literally everywhere. Anything from a dumb tweet she saw offhand, a conversation she overheard in an elevator, or even just a faint thought stuck in her brain was a potential story. So, in a way, she was just training herself and practicing the art of finding story ideas. When you write down literally every story idea that occurs to you, it’s impossible that there’s not a little gold to be mined out of all the shit. (FWIW, my Shit List for FWT newsletters has like 80+ ideas on it. Most of them are bad.)