Why the art of the story pitch starts with getting lost (or naked)

Will Coley sits in the front row of the comedy club, waiting for the headliner to appear. It is a weekend in New York City. The show is sold out. There’s nothing unusual going on — just a couple of friends going out for the evening.

Except that Coley is naked.

That is how the Articles of Interest episode “Nudity” begins. His friend is Articles host Avery Trufelman. This is their story.

How it went from a little idea in Will Coley’s head to where it wound up — the two desperately trying not to allow even their knees to touch now that no denim protects them — can help us understand the mysteries of story pitching.

The importance of surprise

I love the art of the pitch. But we can’t talk about pitching without starting with story mining, because all great pitches come from that moment of curiosity, that sudden sense that says, “Wow. Maybe this is a story.”

It’s an age-old question: Where do ideas come from? No matter how long we’ve been journalists, authors or other creators, some of us always ask, “Where did you get that idea?” And more broadly, “Where do you get your ideas?”

I am thinking about these questions as I run around the track at our local Y and listen to Guy Raz (The Great Creators) interview bestselling author Michael Lewis. Lewis, of Pushkin’s Against the Rules podcast, has written more than 20 books, including The Big Short, Liar’s Poker, Moneyball and The Blind Side. He’s known for painting vivid portraits of iconic characters and pulling readers along on an unexpected journey with them.

Raz wants to know how Lewis finds his characters. He asks, “How many [characters] do you fall in love with … and not end up producing a book around?”

I lose count of my laps around the track as I listen to Lewis’ answer. He says:

[Meeting characters] happens. What happens more often is … I’m surfing the world for ideas all the time. I mean, every moment of my existence. I’m walking around, meeting people and I’m not thinking, “Oh, I’m looking for a book.” It’s more that I listen! So over and over, I meet people, I think, “Oh, that could be interesting.”

He’s surfing the world for ideas all the time. Every moment of his existence.

In my opinion, it’s what we should be doing. In Lewis’ process, new ideas aren’t so much generated as they are discovered.

And then there is equally prolific author (The Orchid Thief, The Library Book) and New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean, discussing travel and how she finds stories with Atlas Obscura’s Dylan Thuras. Orlean’s process is even more overtly one of discovery,  because it starts with getting lost. On purpose.

“I feel like I can’t see things if I’m prepared, because if I’m prepared, then what I’m looking for is just, it’s a confirmation bias. I’m just looking for the things that I was told I should look for,” she says. “I would rather waste a certain amount of time missing the highlights in exchange for just truly being somewhere new and being surprised by it and being a little lost.”

She describes reporting a feature about Midland, Texas. Running for president, George W. Bush had said, “If you want to know who I am, you need to know Midland, because I am Midland, Texas.” So Orlean told her New Yorker editors, “I want to go to Midland.”

But she didn’t prepare for her trip. In fact, she tells Thuras, she avoided preparing. Here’s why:

I felt like I need to be like the person landing behind the enemy lines in the middle of the war, and I’ve got to find the hostels and the friendlies and claw my way to your understanding. And I had a fantastic trip.

In the beginning, I thought, What the hell am I doing? And I just found a coffee shop, and it turned out to be a cool coffee shop. And at some point a guy was sitting there, and we started chatting, and he said to me, “Oh, well, I’ll show you Midland. I’ve lived here my whole life, and I kind of know the way it works.” And off we went. And then I stopped in a realtor’s open house and started chatting with the realtor to say, “What’s selling? What’s not selling? What are people looking for in Midland, Texas?” So I had to really see it and really be there and not say, “Oh, well, I think you’re supposed to go to the Midland Museum and the Midland blah blah.” My purpose was to try to describe the character of the city.

There is a lot of nuance about the story-mining process, and about creativity itself, in the tale Susan Orlean recounts.

1. Get lost on purpose, often.
   When we wander regularly, as Orlean suggests, we increase our opportunities to discover the unknown and to see the known with new eyes. (We don’t actually have to fly anywhere to do it. For more on how, learn Julia Cameron’s conception of “the artist date” in her classic book The Artist’s Way.)
2. You interpret the world differently than anyone else.
   If you simply look for stories where others point you, all you’ll find is confirmation bias. You won’t find any surprises. You certainly won’t see and interpret anything through your own unique perspective. Don’t allow others to dictate your findings by going only where you’re pointed. Trust your curiosity to take you to new places and ideas.
3. Remote work helps us finish jobs. But it’s not where we should start.
   Our reliance on screens isn’t just isolating us, it’s damaging our creative abilities to discover untold stories. To mine for new and noteworthy stories, we have to be on the ground, acting as open-minded witnesses to what’s happening in the world. We need to get in the habit of asking strangers to tell us about their lives.

Be wide-eyed in the world

I think of what both Michael Lewis and Susan Orlean practice as story mining by walking around.

Despite what Lewis says, it’s not exactly accidental: Consistently finding new and interesting story ideas is the payoff for living a life led by constant curiosity.

Great story ideas are not one-offs. We can get better and better at finding and pitching stories when we do a few things:

a) Expand our field of inquiry

b) Become more inventive about how we frame stories (often by collaborating), and

c) Trust your own taste. Trust that what you’re interested in is worthy of exploration.

How to expand your field of inquiry

To get one fantastic story idea, we must look for them, as Lewis says, all the time. It should be second nature.

Apart from seeking out more person-to-person contacts, how else can you intentionally expand your field of inquiry?

Even if you’re freelancing, assign yourself a beat or two. Choose subjects you’re passionate about. Create Google News Alerts on these subjects, keeping them narrow enough to return usable results.

From the results, create a source list. Do what new reporters do in their first weeks: Call people before you’re seeking a quote and simply ask them what they’re working on. What’s interesting or challenging to them right now? Who else should you speak with? When you find a particularly interesting source, call them regularly just to check in (put reminders on your calendar). Not only will you develop relationships this way, you’re almost certain to discover interesting stories to pursue. Later, they’re likely to call you with story tips.

We can also expand our fields of inquiry by consuming information that we normally don’t — newsletters, scientific reports, government documents, new federal action trackers like this one, lawsuits, open records requests, tiny local, ethnic or religious newspapers — through which we’ll learn what’s happening on the ground before others have discovered it. One small statistic buried in a routine government document can be the germ of a feature story or a whole podcast series. If possible, given local news resource constraints, get out into your community when you’re not on deadline. Get to know people. Learn what’s on their minds. Ask for the stories that shaped their worldviews. Ask what happened.

My father was a photographer before photography was digital. He believed in the need to shoot 36 photos — the number of frames on a roll of film — to get one good one. And if you got one good one, that was a win.

This is, in fact, what Michael Lewis is doing.

Try a new frame, or learning from exposure

But expanding our fields of inquiry and purposely getting lost within them, as Orlean might say, is just the first step.

The second is to reexamine the frame through which we’re seeing a potential story. Sometimes all it takes to turn a mediocre idea into a great one, and a rejection into an acceptance, is to change the frame.

Which brings me back to audio journalist Will Coley.

Let’s find out why he’s sitting in the front row of a packed comedy club with no clothes on, embarrassed but deliberately not squirming.

Coley is a curious, inventive and skilled journalist. His work has appeared on NPR News, 99% Invisible and the BBC World Service, among others. He’s an experienced story miner who takes his own personal interests seriously.

So when he got interested in the concept of social nudity, he came by it naturally. He had taken a naked yoga class and knew there was quite a bit of interest in it. Wondering what prompts people to engage in nonsexual, community-oriented “social nudity” such as naked yoga, nude beaches, naked Broadway theater and Korean spas, he conceived of a series of vignettes, episodes that would hopscotch from one activity to another. The stories would pop: Imagine the scene in which Coley interviews people who walk down the streets of New York with nothing on but body paint for the city’s “Naked Body Painting Day.”

He pitched his project to Transom, Radiolab and a few others.

It was enticing, right?

Wrong.

It was missing a key element.

Editors kept asking, “‘What do we learn? What is the surprise coming out of this?’” Coley says. “It was suggested to me at some point that I should find someone who experienced [social nudity] for the first time. And I was like, ‘How am I going to do that?’”

He almost gave up. But then he turned the idea sideways. One day it occurred to him that Articles of Interest, a popular podcast about clothes, might be interested in a story about why we wear them in the first place. He crafted a pitch and sent it to host and producer Avery Trufelman.

The good news? She wrote back immediately. The bad news? Like the other editors, she wasn’t interested in his pitch. But she would be interested in a piece about the history of nudity. Would he be up for that?

Absolutely.

Then she proposed a visit to a naked comedy show. Sure, he said. I’m game.

“But I did not read the fine print,” he says. “I thought, OK, the comedians are going to be naked. This will be interesting. But then we get there, and I find out the first two rows of the audience are to be naked.”

Avery had purchased tickets in the second row.

Later, Coley would realize that he’d stumbled on the surprise the story needed. He had, in fact, acted on the advice he’d been given: Find someone experiencing social nudity for the first time.

“I just didn’t think it was going to be me,” he says.

Coley’s lesson: If you know in your gut there’s a story there, don’t abandon a rejected pitch.

Change the frame. Find the surprise. Sell the story.

A public radio veteran, Elaine Appleton Grant provides host coaching and strategic editorial consulting services to public media and mission-driven organizations. She writes Sound Judgment, a newsletter about the crafts of journalism and storytelling.