Katia Savchuk on Finding the Longform Idea

Earlier this week, I posted my thoughts on Finding the Longform Idea (Part Two), a follow up to this Medium post on idea hunting.

Today, I’m excited to bring you a new interview on finding the longform idea with Katia Savchuk, a magazine writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area and a former staff reporter at Forbes. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atavist Magazine, Mother Jones, Marie Claire and many other publications.

Katia takes us into her process of hunting for story ideas, and reminds us to follow our curiosity. Story hunting, she says, can be uncomfortable for many writers, but we can try to tap into a sense of play, excitement and even fun.

In addition to writing her own stories, Katia occasionally interviews other nonfiction writers about their craft choices and writing process for the Nieman Storyboard, like this two-part series with nonfiction author and New Yorker staff writer, David Grann.

Katia has dissected pitches for Storyboard to find out what makes them work or not, like this one, in which I shared with her a pitch that was rejected at Wired, along with another that became a cover story.

I’ve known Katia for a while, but I did not realize until we chatted this week that we have more in common than I realized. Both of us wrote poetry in middle school, became interested in journalism by high school, and worked for our campus newspapers—where we pissed off our principals with articles we wrote. Both of us knew early on that we gravitated toward feature writing. We are also moms, and the struggle to juggle longform writing with competing aspects of our lives is real.

Katia has also received support and honors for her work from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the Society of Professional Journalists (NorCal chapter), the San Francisco Press Club, and the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University. 

Here’s our interview:

Do you have a process for how you find and collect ideas?

When I'm actively hunting for ideas, newspapers are a big source. I look through local news archives: searching for things I'm interested in using Nexis, reading certain sections of local papers, or sometimes just browsing for the unexpected.

Lawsuits are often a good entryway to a story, something I gravitate to. I almost went to law school, so it makes sense. But also there’s a built-in conflict. There's a lot of documentation. Ideally, there are gray areas. Courthouse News is one site that aggregates a lot of different cases.

I've found ideas hunting through trade journals and law reviews. A long time ago, I wrote a story for The Village Voice about special needs trusts and the lack of regulation, and some unscrupulous guardians there. I found that leafing through a legal journal, looking for something that seemed interesting. 

Do you set aside time? Or do you try to do it in between other things? Or do you have a week where you're thinking: “I'm going to look for story ideas.” How do you manage that?

I think it depends what phase I'm in. Right now I'm sort of getting back to a blank slate. I will be setting aside certain mornings for a few hours to do that, and also just getting out of the house, I think is helpful, just to have that slightly playful mindset. Sometimes, I even go to a bookstore, or the library, and just randomly see what catches my attention. Just to get juices flowing. 

At some point, a professor told me that your ideas come from only two places: reading or talking to people. I don't know if that's strictly true, but the idea is that they don't really come from thinking. Personal essays are an exception.

Also, if I'm pre-reporting something that might be interesting, I'll call somebody who's an expert in that field and just talk on background. Then I'll ask, usually, is there something else you think that people should know more about, or is there something you think could be a story that people don't know about? That has led to interesting leads. 

And then at other periods of time, I established a habit where I would try to look for story ideas for five minutes a day. I was doing one of those power habit things. I get to check this box. And supposedly, if you do it for 66 days, then it's a habit.

There's a momentum that happens. So it might be sending an email. There's something you want to look into, you send a quick email about access. But the ball is rolling. So something that might sit on the back burner when you have a very busy day, is kind of in motion. 

Another big place that ideas come from is other failed ideas. As you're reporting a pitch, it might not work out for whatever reason, it might fall through, or the editor doesn't want it. But often there might be an adjacent story. Once you start, then you're in a world, or you're talking to people, you're reading, and something else comes up that maybe is going to be the actual story you do. 

When you're organizing these ideas, do you have a method? How do you keep track of all these little nuggets that could one day lead somewhere?  

I have a Google Doc spreadsheet. Well, actually, I have a spreadsheet of everything, and then I have another one that lists here are the five that I'm trying to look into. 

Then, for the five, here's where it might go, here's the status. But I haven't updated lately. I'm coming back from maternity leave, and so I just email myself ideas, because I always have my phone. 

When you're looking for an idea, you talked a little bit earlier about the court cases, which already have built-in conflict, but how are you thinking about whether this could be a longform idea? What elements does it need to have? Or what would rise to the level of you wanting to keep going with it and try to figure it out?

Paul Kix and others talk about the "And Rule," where in order to work in longform, a story needs to have multiple elements: 'This happened, and this happened, and this happened.'" If just one thing that happened, that's a news story. There has to be some twists and turns. Not as many as for a book, where you need even more.

But there are different kinds of longform, right? There are some stories that are a little more idea based. But I think there has to be some conflict, there has to be some gray area, there has to be some characters that you can follow, some potential scenes. Not just one thing that happened, and that's the end. Something has to happen over time, so there are places that you could go.

It has to generally have a larger “so what” quality to it. Not just something that's happening in a local place, even if it's interesting. It has to have some universal, deeper meaning, or maybe it's emblematic of something nationally. It just can't really be “oh, this is a cool project that this nonprofit is doing.”

And then are there certain kinds of ideas that get you excited? Where you think: “I would love to know more about this.” There are so many potential ideas out there, but what makes you excited to do it? 

I am a generalist, so there's a wide variety of stories. But I do notice that mystery is a theme that I gravitate to again and again. It doesn't have to be a crime. It can be medical mysteries.

I loved reading detective stories as a kid. I think that element of mystery really grabs me. Or often it is a crime, or someone playing detective in some way.

Inequality and injustice also grab me. These are topics that, since I was very young, have interested me in different ways. That could mean looking at poverty, wrongdoing or unscrupulous actions by powerful people and institutions.

There was your Marie Claire story, “Can Guaranteed Income Help Americans Escape Poverty?” You followed a single mother of three Mississippi who received $1,000 a month for a year.

Yes, or a long time ago, I wrote about adult protective services in New York, faking visits, and it had been neglectful. Older disabled people had died.

And for another story, I wrote about how JPMorgan and a lawyer were enriching themselves by overseeing a special needs trust and not paying out anything to the severely autistic teen whose mother had set it up. She had died, and there wasn't a lot of regulatory oversight. 

Lately, I do think more about the logistics of reporting a story too. I have heard the advice “try to do it in your backyard.” Especially if you're trying to break in somewhere. I've had editors tell me this too. Especially if you're just pitching it to an ambitious place, they want to know you can easily go back to get things if you missed them, as opposed to them taking a chance on paying to send you somewhere.

When did you start to know you wanted to be a longform writer?

I knew I wanted to be a writer forever, in elementary and middle school. I wrote little books, historical fiction, or poetry. I wrote a poem when I was five on a napkin. I was on the newspaper in middle school. Our high school paper was really good. And I was editor in chief. I reported on robberies at school, stories that the principal was mad at. I started doing feature reporting in high school. I reported on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by talking to high schoolers there. I wrote about secretive urban explorers and met with one at the beach at night; my mom waited in the car behind me. I've just always loved delving into fascinating worlds and writing stories.

During college, I wrote for a travel guide in France and spent a semester on the college paper. But I had to step away because I had to do paid jobs. I worked as an editorial assistant and I did a lot of volunteering, because that qualified for work-study. I thought about going to law school, and then I worked in India doing documentation in informal settlements for a nonprofit, before working for a private investigative firm. 

So all of it was research, interviewing, telling stories, but a different format. At the investigative firm you write these long memos. And then I just thought: “I would like for these to be read, and not just go to a file cabinet.” There were some cool assignments, but no one reads them, except the people commissioning them. 

I interned at two newspapers, but I wanted to take time to do deeper stories. I always asked them to let me do features. It's part of my metabolism. Trying to tell the definitive story, with nuance.

Do you have a story about how you found a story? Like when you wrote “Beyond Belief” for The Atavist, I remember you also broke down your detailed process for Storyboard.

“Beyond Belief” was from news articles. I read about it when it was happening in 2015. I took note of it. But it wasn't a good fit for the staff job I had at the time. Later, when I was a freelancer, I was looking at wedding venues. And then we went to a cafe nearby, and there was a newspaper out on the table that was open. It said they had just won a settlement from the city of Vallejo. It was right there.

There was a shorter piece I did for The New Yorker about inflation trackers. I heard editors prefer things to be newsy for Talk of the Town. I thought: What's in the news? Inflation? I thought: “How do they really track inflation?” Did someone go out to look for prices? 

Or with the Russian-Ukraine War. The war had just started. I speak Russian. I was just looking on social media—and I've never found a story on social media before—but I just saw these posts on POWs, and then I went into the telegram channels, and eventually found this YouTuber. That turned into another piece for The New Yorker on vlogging the war.

So much work goes into the story hunt, into pitching, even before reporting and writing. What makes you keep going?

I think it’s curiosity. Sometimes I come across ideas, and it just feels a little bit mercenary. I could see this as a story. I could pitch it, But I'm just not into it. And it depends on what season you are in life, too.

Sometimes things require more immersion, or not. Every now and then I just want a story that feels really interesting, and maybe a little more fun and cinematic. I'm also drawn to stories that I feel could bring to light hidden wrongdoing or injustice, or that portray the lives of marginalized people or those who might be seen in an overly simplistic way in three dimensions.

How do you feel about the pitching process?

I feel pitching is the best way to get stories, because even if that idea doesn't work out, then you're in a conversation, and then you might learn what they want, or it might lead to a source that has another idea. It’s in the doing, as opposed to just thinking.

But finding ideas is really challenging, because you never know if you're gonna find it, until you find it. It just takes pounding the pavement until something strikes you.

The idea stage, it's an uncomfortable stage. There's anxiety. Will it totally pan out, or is this time going to be fruitful? You just don't know. 

I’ve heard that from a lot of writers. You can almost feel kind of lost when you don't have that next idea. But how do you describe that feeling when you do find it? What does that do for you? 

You just have a lot of questions. Maybe you read something in the news, but you think: “Okay, but how did they feel in that moment? And how did they end up at this juncture in their lives?” Or “Wait, this is an interesting contrast.” 

You feel you want to have an in-depth answer. You can't wait to get started. What's hidden in these documents? What stories do people have to tell? What can you uncover that hasn't been out there?

It's a sense of intense curiosity. Almost that childlike feeling that I had back in high school. 

---