Finding the Longform Idea: With Alizeh Kohari

It was such a treat to guest edit The Sunday Long Read last week. I hope you enjoy the selections as much as I did. I highlighted pieces that exemplify great story ideas, reporting, and craft. Thanks to the SLR editors for inviting my picks, and to the journalists and editors out there doing such stellar work.

Recently, I posted this interview with freelance magazine writer Katia Savchuk, on finding the longform idea, a follow up to my previous two posts, which offered tips for finding narrative feature ideas.

This week, I am excited to continue our discussions on idea hunting, this time with the talented Alizeh Kohari, who was recently awarded a reporting grant from the Kari Howard Fund for Narrative Journalism. Kari, a former Los Angeles Times colleague of mine who passed away in 2022, had a deep appreciation for storytelling and editing. Alizeh’s longform work embodies the narrative journalism that Kari championed.

Alizeh’s award-winning reporting appears in the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, Wired, The Atlantic, and other publications. Her work has also been supported by the Pulitzer Center, Internews, and the Overseas Press Club, and has been featured on Longreads and Longform.

Alizeh spent four years as a staffer at Herald, Pakistan’s oldest current-affairs magazine, where her reporting ran the gamut from mob lynchings, to mysterious peacock deaths, to a people’s history of the Indus River.

Most recently, she was an editorial coach at Global Press, a nonprofit newsroom, where she trained reporters from Mongolia, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. Between 2015 and 2017, she was a Fulbright scholar at NYU. In the summer in between, she worked with Reuters in Mexico City.

Alizeh discussed with me her approach to searching for stories, trusting your instincts, reporting on systems, hanging out with people who are doing interesting things, and that magical feeling when an idea finally comes together.

Hope you enjoy our interview.

How did you start doing longform?

I have only ever been a journalist. I started out at a magazine in Pakistan, which was a bit of a dinosaur even then. It was only in print. It barely had a web presence. It didn’t need to make any money because it was the prestigious sister pub of one of the largest English-language dailies in Pakistan, one of those old school places where you could pursue something just for the heck of it, full of veteran journalists who loved to talk. Even though it was a monthly magazine, they would just hang out there, smoke and talk about news all night. You learn a lot that way, though osmosis if nothing else.

We had a very quirky editor-in-chief who I instantly connected with and who is still a very important resource for me. He was even a witness in my wedding ceremony. He would come up with very ambitious ideas, then challenge you to run with them.

One day he randomly said: “We should do a story on the Indus River.” That was it. Nothing else. That ended up being my first real longform piece and it really was like jumping off the deep end because it ended up being nearly 10,000 words. Myself and a photojournalist, we traveled the length of the Indus River, which also is the length of the country itself. We spent nearly three months reporting, broken up into three different trips, just traveling and talking to people. That turned into a story about river engineering, its fraught history along the Indus, and about the changing relationship between the river and communities who live by it. 

This is not how I approach longform now—these days, in my experience, publications rarely give you such freedom to explore, certainly not if you aren’t on staff, so you need a much better sense of what the story will be before you get it greenlit—but that sense of wonder and play was absolutely essential when I first tried my hand at the form. Not just during reporting but also during writing, which took about six months.

I read everything from Joan Didion to Eduardo Galeano to William Finnegan while working on that piece. Pakistan was also still a pretty hot topic for foreign press, so some really great journalists would stop by the newsroom. Matthieu Aikins, who was doing a story on Karachi for Harper’s, came and gave a workshop. I’d never gone to journalism school, so that exercise in deconstructing longform — he focused on profiles, I think — was very useful.

The piece that I wrote, on the Indus, was shortlisted for a major prize. I felt like the world’s biggest imposter to be on a list alongside really accomplished journalists, from Reuters and The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, but there was also a sense of “okay, maybe I can do this.” By then, in any case, I’d already caught the literary journalism bug and I’ve clung to it — or it has clung to me — ever since.

When you started learning what longform is, and then setting out on your own to freelance and find stories, how did you start to think about what you need for a story? How would you begin?

I feel the best stories sort of work with two levels. You have the bigger story, which is usually a story about systems and then you have the human story of people trying to navigate those systems. That tension of people caught up in bigger systems is always interesting. If done well, it can have an epic feel to it. So figuring out those two levels and then how a particular group of people, or a particular person, responds in their particular way within a broader system — those are my ingredients for a good longform story, especially if I need it to resonate with a larger audience. 

For me, as a journalist from Pakistan who initially started out writing for Pakistani audiences, one major challenge when I began pitching publications outside the country was figuring out how to tease out the universal aspect of a story, how to make it appealing for audiences less familiar with Pakistan, how to get editors interested, honestly, without letting go of the Pakistani reader, either. Narratives that toggle between those two levels—the systems story and the human story—have worked best for me so far.

How do you identify what the system is? Are you starting with the problem? Are you starting with the system? Are you starting with the person, or could it be all of it?  

It’s varied. A few years ago I did a series of stories on biometric surveillance in Pakistan. That started with identifying the system, then the problem, then the people in its crosshairs. There had been a great deal of reporting from India on the Aadhaar card and its effect on ordinary Indians. A social scientist in Karachi mentioned, in passing, that the equivalent system in Pakistan was even more pervasive and possibly more pernicious. I got curious about how that came to be. That was the starting point for that piece, the story of the system itself. In fact, the person who ended up being the central character was someone I met towards the very end of my reporting trip.     

Sometimes the human story is so interesting and dramatic that you start there and pan out. After that initial piece about the Indus River, I’d kept in touch with a group of fishermen and activists I’d met during my reporting and that’s how I found out that they had filed a legal court case that could have dramatic consequences for them. I already knew who the main characters of that story would be, so I tried to step back and see the broader picture of how they ended up in that system. 

Is it important to trust your gut on ideas, and how do you do this, especially when as a freelancer these longform pieces can be so difficult to place?

Trust your gut. It’s difficult to say this to journalists who are just starting out, when you’re eager to please or just place your stories or sometimes just not fully sure of yourself as a journalist yet. Rejection, or worse, indifference to a pitch can be really demoralizing. But step back and ask yourself: “What are my reasons for wanting to approach this idea in this particular way? Are they well thought out?” If you can clearly articulate that, then I say stick to your guts. But make sure to have that conversation with your editor, if possible, not just in your head. Editors are indispensable and most of them are great and they will save you again and again. Let them!

So, be open to input.    

Absolutely. Finding editors who you build a relationship with over time and across stories can really help because then you’re not simultaneously trying to understand the person and their editing process and the ethos of the publication. Everyone wants those big-name bylines but really there’s the magic of just having a good editor-writer combo where the work will shine and sing and, through word of mouth, you’ll get it to the people who should be reading it. 

We know that this kind of work is hard on so many levels. From finding the idea, to pitching the idea, to executing the idea, to getting it out there, and the aftermath of getting it out there. How would you describe why you do this, and what is propelling you to keep doing this hard work?

When you’re out reporting and you see something happen—and it doesn’t have to be anything very big—but in your head, a scene in your story comes together. That feeling is so satisfying. It’s not even a high, it’s more like a moment of calm. You have your lede or perhaps your kicker. The narrative pieces begin fitting into place. All your reporting, all your research has led to this moment that, despite all the legwork, manages to feel serendipitous. I think I’m always chasing that feeling. 

Do you have a method for organizing your ideas? Do you have a way of saving ideas for later? 

I have an Excel spreadsheet. It’s rarely coherent, or at least only to myself. Maybe that's good because nobody can steal my ideas, even if they hack into it. I also have Post-its. I will scribble on a Post-it and stick it next to my computer screen. Then it's staring at me and taunting me: “Remember this thing that you said that you would do?” I’ve tried Evernote, I’ve tried Scrivener, I’ve tried physical notebooks, but that's probably the most effective. I’m quite chaotic, honestly. Sometimes I’ll take photos of the Post-it wall when some of them are beginning to look like they might fall off. 

In terms of the search, are you combing through journals and newspapers? Are you asking other people for ideas? How do you start that process?

I do two things these days: I read a lot, just indiscriminately, whatever I'm interested in. Now that I'm in a university town, I also attend a lot of academic talks, especially by ethnographers and anthropologists. They're doing very similar work, and often they can be a great resource.

And increasingly, especially when I’m back in Pakistan, I’ll randomly go on excursions with activist friends, or people doing interesting things. It's my way of trying to recreate some of those more exploratory trips I was able to take at my first job. I’ll ask to go along, without promising anything, so it's low stakes. I’m not the journalist scribbling in a corner. But often I come back with a story idea anyway.

What are you looking forward to next? 

I am wrapping up a long piece about the mass deportations of Afghans from Pakistan over the past year. It’s one of the largest instances of non-refoulement in recent history. Then, I’m reporting a story in northern Pakistan where I’m accompanying nomadic herders on their seasonal migratory route to the lowlands. That’s a very mountainous region and I’m not very sure-footed. So that’ll be an adventure. 

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