The Idea Machine
Check out the session summary below.
Panelist
- Jack El-Hai, independent writer
By Ruth Nasrullah
Finding and developing story ideas can be challenging, especially for freelance journalists.
But there are strategies for identifying ideas and developing them into meaningful, focused articles.
Jack El-Hai encouraged attendees to seek ideas even in seemingly unlikely places. His suggestions included legal notices, overheard conversations, social media posts and Craigslist ads. He also recommended a state of mind that can help writers identify potential stories. For instance, he suggested that time spent doing household chores can result in a frame of mind that facilitates inspiration.
El-Hai incorporated several exercises into the session. In one, he asked participants to write down all the communities they belong to — personal, professional, social or other — and begin thinking of ways those communities are sources of ideas for articles.
After exploring the process of identifying story ideas, El-Hai turned his attention to developing those ideas into workable subjects. He advised attendees to experiment with different story structures, suggesting alternatives to the traditional inverted pyramid.
Such alternatives include “the circle,” in which the story ends at the beginning, and “the braid,” which follows a main thread but weaves other narrative threads into the piece. His accompanying presentation included a graphic that used a rollercoaster to illustrate how to develop the course of a story’s narrative.
He then provided methods of judging ideas to help identify those that are most promising. He suggested includes identifying qualities such as “challenging,” “instructive,” “personally intense” and “career-intensive.” He provided a formula he uses based on those qualities to rate the ideas and select those worth pursuing.
“Subjectively appraise each story idea, use some math, and you’ll come up with your score,” El-Hai said.
He went on to describe methods for saving and categorizing story ideas. He uses a database to categorize story ideas into groups such as timeliness, quality scores and sources.
“Most important is to tag your story ideas well,” he said. “Doing all these things is how you become an idea machine.”
Ruth Nasrullah is an independent journalist based in Houston. She was a 2023 AHCJ-Texas Journalism Fellow.