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How do you know when you have a good story?
A good Geiger counter is what I call the “pillow of air.” For instance, I call Ira Glass’s radio
program, This American Life, “pillow-of-air radio.” I use the term to describe that experience of
turning on the show and sitting down to balance your checkbook while you listen, and forty-five
minutes later you realize that you haven’t moved your pen. And what you also notice is that your
mouth has been open and the air in it has become completely still. There is a pillow of air lodged in
your mouth that hasn’t moved for two or three minutes. You simply forget to breathe ! You lose
yourself to the experience. It is better than anything else in the world. It is intuitive, but it is literally
physical.
If I find myself in a “pillow of air” relationship to a story, that’s a pretty good indication it is a
good story.
Once you’ve had a “pillow of air” experience, how do you tell the story?
Triangulation is the key. I generally don’t try to hit something head-on. I hit it from as many
different sides as possible. For example, to get at the question of why we believe in money, I hit it
from the side of art, from the side of this guy Boggs, etc. And I try to keep all these different angles
going throughout the piece. I’m not particularly interested in interviewing Milosevic when I write
about Serbia, or Walesa when I write about Poland. I’m much more interested in taking the
temperature of the whole scene, in the bubbling that is crossing over borders.
In addition to approaching subjects from varied angles, your pieces often have a moment where
you suddenly stop and take the reader in an entirely different direction.
I call that the “trapdoor.” I like to build up the velocity of the story, and at the climactic moment,
the moment when I really begin to hot things up, I take the reader through a trapdoor. He isn’t
expecting it, and I use the occasion to introduce him to some new material— other characters, a bit of
history, some philosophy. At the moment when the piece has really gotten going, I’m liable to tell the
reader, “Now, to understand what is going to happen next, let’s step back for a second and take a look
at this . . .”
How are “triangulation” and “trapdoors” related?
Well, because I’ve taken the reader through the trapdoor at the height of the piece, he is just dying
to get back to the main story. The trapdoor may, for example, introduce the reader to a more
conventional history at that point. But because this information is being imparted in the context of the
skewed, highly interpretive— although not inaccurate—pedestal I’ve put it on, via triangulation, it
will itself be skewed. It isn’t straight explication, and the reader may not even realize that it is, so to
say, “good for him.” All I’m saying to the reader at the point I take him through the trapdoor is, “This
story I’m telling you is really cool and fun. And in order to make it even more fun, you need to know
the following things . . .”
Do you prefer pursuing stories you’ve come up with, or stories that come from an editor?