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?
