When I pitch story ideas to the various news outlets I report for, one word that comes up a lot during conversations with my editors is “surprise,” an essential, but often elusive ingredient of the successful story.
In any form of storytelling, surprise is like the baking soda in a classic chocolate chip cookie recipe; the dough might look good and even taste good without it, but if you don’t add enough or forget to add the baking soda altogether, the cookies will ultimately come out flat and forgettable.
By definition, surprise sounds simple enough:
But “unexpected” is the key word; finding new story ideas that the listener/reader/viewer does not expect can be extremely challenging.
For example, a lot of reporters who are looking for new ways to cover our country’s current economic trials end up re-telling the same stories using this tired formula:
the recession + (blank*) = a story
*chiropractors, campgrounds, caterers, etc.
The problem with a lot of the stories that follow this formula is that whatever goes in the blank is often something the listener would expect to be the case during a recession, so the story comes as no surprise to them.
By contrast, here are two examples of recent news stories that, in my opinion, got it right:
NPR ~ For Some Pilots, Home is an LAX Parking Lot: Commercial airline pilots have created a city of trailers and RVs in a parking lot along the edges of the nation’s third busiest airport.
New York Times ~ Living in Tents, and by the Rules, Under a Bridge: Other tent cities have sprung up recently around the country, but Rhode Island officials have never seen anything like this. The community… established a five-member leadership council and a compact that read in part: “No one person shall be greater than the will of the whole.”
My family members come to me with a lot of good story ideas, but more often we won’t be talking about story ideas at all, and they’ll mention things they saw or heard in passing that are far more surprising.
This mystifies me! Maybe the difference is in my journalism training and their lack thereof, or in their own low opinion of their storytelling judgment – I don’t know. But this phenomenon makes me wonder what incredible untold stories are flying around out there in the world, waiting to be recognized and shared.
If you spot one, please drop me a line.
