Finding Stories — Training the Ear for Story and Voice
Brandon Stanton (@humansofny) photographs people he meets on the street and writes down what people tell him about their lives. He started doing this in New York, but now he travels all over the world. His blog posts consist of other peoples’ stories, but he collects and edits these exchanges. His special skill is finding human stories by asking just the right questions and recording those stories so that we feel we know the people he discovers. He gives them a voice. Stanton has a gift for FINDING stories over and over again. His posts are often deeply moving, like this one he tweeted earlier this week:
Humans of New York, Stanton’s collections of blog posts, is a New York Times best seller.
Brandon Stanton’s strength as a writer comes from his ability to record the authentic voices of the people he encounters and his ability to ask the questions that will uncover their most important stories. Learning to hear other people’s voices and recognize their stories is a fundamental skill for creative writers, but how do writers develop this skill?
First, we have to know what questions to ask to engage people, and then we have to make people feel comfortable opening up. Often, this means opening up ourselves. A couple years ago, one of my students told me, “In order to connect with readers through my writing, I realized I had to make myself vulnerable. It was hard for me to do that.” Exactly.
A couple years ago, The New York Times published, “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love,” — perhaps the most powerful list of questions yet devised for getting to know another human being’s stories. To practice your skills at capturing another person’s voice, we will use these questions.
I will randomly assign each member of our class a partner or two and give you two entire periods to talk to each other, asking the questions on this list. If you come to a question that makes you uncomfortable, just say, “Let’s go on to the next one.” Try hard to treat this experience like a CONVERSATION rather than an interview. When someone says something interesting, ask following up questions. It is NOT necessary for you to ask ALL the questions provided here. You just need to ask enough questions to find a good story. The first day you talk to your partner, you might want to use the whole period to simply go through the questions you like, and put a star by the ones that have the most interesting answers.
After you have talked with your partner for a while, go back to the questions you starred, and pick a few good ones to record your partner answering a second time. Ask as many follow up questions as you can to get to important details.
Once you have uncovered a good story from your partner, write down your partner’s words, imitating what you see Brandon Stanton doing. For this exercise, limit your writing to around 300–400 words. Use only your partner’s words rather than writing this as an interview or bringing your experience of the discussion into the writing. (“Today I had a conversation with…..”) Using only your partner’s words might mean using brackets to clarify, like this: “[If I could have dinner with anyone it would be] George Clooney. He has the best personality, you know? Intelligent and drop dead handsome at the same time. One time, I actually wrote him a fan letter that my brother found. It was horrible.”
As you translate your partner’s responses into words, be careful not to edit out ALL the slang or verbal ticks like “ya know.” These idiosyncrasies help to capture the speaker’s personality, and personality is what writers mean by “voice.” Voice gives life to a character and helps readers care. Developing an ear for the quirks of individual speakers is one of a writer’s most important skills. (Having said this, also know that editing out SOME verbal ticks will often make the writing much easier to read.)
You will have today and tomorrow to talk to your partner during class. The day after that, I will give you time to read and edit each others’ pieces and to do a mutual “photo shoot” with your partner. Take a picture that fits the post you will write. If you’d like, you can also share pictures with each other, drawing from those you may have on your phones. Pick something that works especially well with your post.
Use Medium to write your post. After you have checked your post with your partner (Be careful not to post anything your partner does not wish you to post), post your Medium link in our Schoology update feed to share with our class. Be sure to include your partner’s picture in the Medium post.
