To do great writing, read great writing. Here’s the great writing I’ve been reading this week:
Once upon a time, Malcolm Gladwell decided he wanted to write about shampoo. He thought it would be fun, so he started doing interviews. Until one day someone he was interviewing asked why he was fascinated by shampoo when hair color was much more interesting. That was all Gladwell needed to switch course, and the result was “True Colors,” a story about the women who pioneered the hair color market that appeared in The New Yorker in March 1999.
Gladwell tells the story behind that story in the preface to What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, a collection of his New Yorker essays that was published in 2009 and updated last year with a reading group guide.
I like this story about Gladwell for several reasons, not the least of which is because it makes him seem less like of a publishing superstar and more like your average writer struggling to distinguish bad story ideas from good, something the rest of us can relate to.
Gladwell goes into his story idea generating process in the book’s preface:
The question I get asked most often is, Where do you get your ideas? I never do a good job of answering that. I usually say something vague about how people tell me things, or my editor, Henry, gives me a book that gets me thinking, or I say that I just plain don’t remember. When I was putting together this collection, I thought I’d try to figure out once and for all. There is, for example, a long and somewhat eccentric piece in this book on why no (one) has ever come up with a ketchup to rival Heinz. (How do we feel when we eat ketchup?) That idea came from my friend Dave, who is in the grocery business. We have lunch every now and again, and hi is the kind of person who thinks about things like that. (Dave also has some fascinating theories about melons, but that’s an idea I’m saving for later.) …
The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell. I say trick but what I really mean is challenge, because it’s a very hard thing to do. Our instinct as humans, after all, is to assume that most things are not interesting. We flip through the channels on the television and reject ten before we settle on one. We go to the bookstore and look at twenty novels before we pick the one we want. We filter and rank and judge. We have to. There’s just so much out there. But if you want to be a writer, you have to fight that instinct every day. Shampoo doesn’t seem interesting? Well, dammit, it must be, and if it isn’t, I have to believe that it will ultimately lead me to something that is.
I love finding out where other writers get their ideas. If you do too, here are links to a couple posts from other writers explaining what led them to a particular story or stories, including a few from me:
- Open Thread: Your Brightest Article Ideas (The Urban Muse) – Be sure to read the comments to see what other writers say about their own idea generation process.
- WordCount’s 12 most popular posts of 2010
- My top 10 stories of 2010
- 10 great places writers can find story ideas