✏️🛠️ So, What Is a Narratively Story, Anyway? (Hint: Surprising, Exciting and Delightful, to Start)
Two Narratively editors break down what defines a feature story for the site and why it might be tricky to pin down—with advice on how to do it.
We get a lot of pitches here at Narratively for our big feature stories — our Deep Dives, Memoirs and Secret Lives. But if we’re being honest, only a small fraction of them really feel like a Narratively feature from the start, not because many of them aren’t great pitches — they are — but because they’re often outside the scope of what we’re looking for. Which can be frustrating to writers and to us, too. Writers put a lot of work into pitches and are hoping to find a home for their stories, and we want to find wonderful stories to publish. So, why is it so hard to pin down what a Narratively story is? We wanted to dig into that question here, in hopes of illuminating our readers and prospective pitchers (and possibly even each other).
We also wanted to take a second to announce some recent changes on our team. If you’re a new subscriber, you might not notice this, but longtime readers are likely used to seeing Brendan Spiegel’s name next to “story edited by” on most of our features… but soon you will be seeing a little less of that. Brendan has (mostly) moved on to launch Narratively Academy, Narratively’s education branch, which we recently announced (and you can learn more about) here, while Jesse takes the reins overseeing editorial content for the site. Below, we discuss those changes (just a bit), break down what does — and doesn’t — make a Narratively story and how to go about finding one yourself.
Brendan: I had a new experience this morning, which is that I woke up and there was a Narratively story in my inbox that I hadn’t read.
Jesse: It’s so funny because I wondered if you would read that piece like an editor and find the sentence you would have changed, or if you would be able to just read it like a person.
Brendan: No, I read it like a person and tried not to edit [laughs].
Jesse: Love that! So, I wanted to start with the basic question of: How do you define a Narratively story? What’s the short pitch you give to people when you’re trying to explain what makes our stories different?
Brendan: I’d say the super short pitch is, ordinary people with extraordinary stories. We focus on ordinary people who have a one-of-a-kind experience or life story to share. I think a big part of what defines us is we don’t focus on celebrities, politicians, sports heroes, the same people who are covered in every publication — but then I think the flip side of what defines us is the extraordinary stories part. We focus on people who have a story that makes us go, “Wow, I’ve never heard of anything like that. That’s a really different perspective.” So I think that’s really the key to me. And when I talk to our submissions readers, I say, “If you’re bringing us a pitch, it should be something you’re telling your friend or your significant other about. We want you to read the pitch and be like, ‘Whoa! Did you know this exists? I’ve never heard of this kind of thing,’ or, ‘Wow, I’ve heard of this world, but I’ve never seen it from that perspective.’”
Jesse: That is so well said. I also use the significant other or friend line all the time because that’s something I actually do. When I’m really excited about something, that gets talked about at the dinner table that night. It’s also just the stories that stick with me. Like, I know right now the stories I’ve been thinking about from the pile — those are the ones that I’ll be sharing with the team.
My short elevator pitch has a lot of elements of the things you said, and I always add that it should be cinematic and action-packed, because I think that’s something that often gets overlooked. And I want to say, too, that so many of the pitches we get are great and things we’re interested in, but just aren’t quite right for us.
Brendan: That’s a really good point you made about whether a story is good or if a story is right for us. I think that’s one thing that people setting out to write or publish stories often don’t realize — that every publication really focuses on a different thing, and the key to getting a story placed is finding the right publication for it. There have been times when people have pitched me and I’m like, “This isn’t right for us, but it could totally be a Saturday profile in The New York Times.”
It’s also important to point out for longtime readers that we have, like any publication, changed and evolved a bit over the years. When we started out, we were doing one feature story every day, so we were publishing a lot of different kinds of stories. And then in the last few years, we really zeroed in on this idea, in terms of our features, of having one big, new feature story each month. So that’s why we really focused on this approach of each story having that really surprising, delightful, exciting element to it. Sometimes someone is like, “This is kind of like something you published eight years ago,” and that’s understandable, that’s on us, but I would say, if you want to get a sense of what we publish, look at our most recent stories. That’s what we’re looking for now.
Jesse: That was one of the things I was going to bring up because I wonder if that’s where some of the confusion lies, or if this happens at every publication, which I think it probably does to a certain extent. I do also think what we do is very specific, so there’s probably that added element of it being a hard thing to pin down.
Brendan: Yeah. And I think the other point you made, too, is important — that it’s cinematic and narrative, made up of exciting scenes and lots of colorful details. We don’t do think pieces, we don’t do idea pieces. We do pieces that have a lot of action and excitement and unfold like a movie. I tend to think of there being three pillars of what makes a Narratively story. One is that it’s untold — surprising, exciting, delightful. Another is that it’s human, or revolves around people rather than ideas or concepts, and three is that it’s narrative and cinematic.
Jesse: If those are the things you feel like Narratively features have to have, are there any things on top of that you think are nice to have?
Brendan: I think if the stories have some element of someone who’s changing that world or disrupting it or fixing a problem in that world, that always adds to our element of something feeling really dynamic and fresh and new. Especially with our subculture stories, we’ll often get people pitching us stories where they’re like, “I want to look at the world of sumo wrestling in Alaska,” and that’s a really good start. But what I want to have is some action and narrative, a love story in the world of sumo wrestling in Alaska, or an epic feud or someone who’s changing that community in some way for the better. So I think anytime there’s a person who’s really enacting change, that’s a big bonus for us.
Jesse: You’ve gotten a lot of feedback over the years — what do you think is the thing that attracts people to a Narratively story?
Brendan: I think it’s having that weird but wonderful quality, but also having that unexpected human connection. I’m thinking about our story, “Ladybeard, the Crown Prince of Japan’s Strangest Music Scene.” Kawaiicore, the music scene there, is super interesting, but we wouldn’t have done an article just on kawaiicore. But the idea of this outsider, this six-foot-tall, bearded, cross-dressing Australian wrestler coming into that scene, and not only coming into it but finding his place there — we call it not a fish out of water story, but a fish finding his water story — I think that’s what attracts people to a story like that. It’s unexpected. You wouldn’t have thought this guy would have made it in that scene, and I think that’s what takes it from just being, here’s this music you should know about, to, wow, that’s a really compelling human story.
Jesse: You wrote a whole post about several pitches that you knew were a go right away. As an editor, how far do you usually need to read into something to know whether it’s going to work or not?
Brendan: There are definitely pitches that I think have sold us on the headline. It’s rare, but there are pitches that any one of us reads and we’re like, “Yup, that’s a Narratively story!” Honestly, one is from that best pitches story, the three generations of human cannonballs story — yes, I had to read into it, but immediately, that’s a world I don’t really know about, and there’s a family dynamic and a human story there, I’m intrigued. I would say the same thing about Hallie Lieberman’s story about the three generations of women who run a sex toy shop in a conservative small city in Alabama where selling sex toys is illegal. None of us had to get much further than that, right? Because it’s got an exciting, potentially awkward family dynamic. It’s got that cultural clash that’s interesting — women running a sex toy shop in New York City, we’d be less surprised by and excited about, but in Florence, Alabama, that’s interesting. And then that idea of it being someone doing it with her mother and her daughter, right away that’s the type of thing that got to us. So, I would say, I know from the headline and the summary of the story if I’m hooked or not, and then as I go into the pitch or ask more questions of the writer, that will be more drilling into this question of, is there enough detail to make this feel like a full Narrative story?
Jesse: I feel similarly. Sometimes after reading a bunch of story ideas that don’t feel right, I start to question myself, like, do I even know what a good story is anymore? Until I get the pitch that makes me go, never mind, this is it! It’s a testament to how hard it can be sometimes, which I don’t really think is anyone’s fault. I think these stories are kind of hard to find honestly. Do you feel the same way?
Brendan: Yeah. That’s why they’re exciting, right? Because they’re things most people haven’t heard of, and they’ve got a lot to them. I think as reporters, we’ve all had that moment where we’re like, “This might be an amazing story,” but then it takes some digging to find out if it’s really there.
Jesse: Where would you look for a story? Do you think it’s the kind of thing that you just hear or read about something and then you’re like, this feels like a nugget, I’m gonna follow this? That’s what I usually do.
Brendan: That’s been the main way I’ve always found stories in my career, being constantly curious. I was reading some magazine stories the other day and finding little lines and feeling like, that’s something I should look into, and keeping that running list of ideas of things to look into. So I think that’s one element, just being constantly curious and thinking, could that be a story?
Another important thing is having a beat or a place you go back to. Going back to Hallie Lieberman, when she was telling us how she found that story about the sex toy shop in Florence, Alabama, she’s really built this niche for herself as someone who develops these sex-positive stories about people working in the sex work industry, and she’s developed all these contacts over the years, so when we put out that call for multigenerational stories about the family business, she got a lot of ideas from a Facebook group right away. If you can find a niche that you own, so if you’re looking for a Narratively story, or any kind of story, you know the places to look, that’s key.
Then the third thing I would say is really getting offline and talking to people. I always go back to something our contributor Laurie Gwen Shapiro once told me — the way she found her story idea for her hit nonfiction book, The Stowaway, was she was eavesdropping on the M14 bus and heard someone talking about their family story. Her advice: “You can’t just be on the internet. Every writer is on the internet. You have to take the bus!” That’s obviously a city-centric viewpoint, but I think that applies to people who live far outside New York where there aren’t a lot of other professional journalists. I think that’s a huge advantage actually. What is the story in your small town that people are talking about that deserves to blow up in some way?
Jesse: I totally agree. You don’t have to feel like you’re actively working all the time, but you have to always have your antennas on. [As we mentioned at the top], one of the reasons we’re talking about this today is because you’ve recently handed me the baton for the editorial side of things while you head off to create our education wing, Narratively Academy. Can you tell readers what that’s all about and what they can look for?
Brendan: Over the past year, we’ve had a lot of success with our StoryCraft pieces — which are pieces all about how to write and tell your story — and that encouraged us to move on this idea that we’ve been ruminating on for a long time, which is writing and storytelling classes. We have a really diverse and broad community of people who’ve written and edited for us, and I think all of us have something of value that we can teach each other, but also learn from each other. So, the idea of Narratively Academy is to tap into this incredible community and offer classes and workshops that can help the rest of us advance our writing and storytelling skills. I’m going to be teaching a class on what we were talking about, on finding story ideas and how to craft exciting and engaging longform narrative features. That’s something I’ve been focusing on for the past 11 years, and the idea is that we want every instructor to be teaching the thing they’re really excited about so that writers can be like, “I want to learn that from that person.”
It’ll all be online for the time being. A couple of the first ones will be one-time hour-long or two-hour workshops, and a couple will be ongoing, multi-week courses. We’re also offering critiques and manuscript reviews, where I and the rest of the editorial team will read your pitch, article, essay or draft of your book and give you feedback on that. So it’s a way to open that door between publication and reader.
Jesse: I’m really so excited for that, it’s going to be such a great resource. As you embark on this new thing and as I embark on this new thing to me, do you have any words of advice?
Brendan: Follow your gut, do what excites you. In the past, the times we’ve gotten off track is when we try to mimic something that someone else does. It never really works to try to mimic someone else, and it’s already out there, so why would you? So follow your gut in terms of what you think would be super exciting and super creative, and go with those story ideas.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.