How do you come up with a story idea?

Let’s pitch being recruited into a sex cult.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made. 

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Allison Mack of NXIVM cult notoriety emailed me a lot of nonsense words in 2014. Here she is, after a 2018 bail hearing in New York. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

When I started journalism grad school in May 2001, I did it because I loved to write. I quickly learned, however, that I had no idea how to report. For years, I’d been writing all day, every day, on subways, in libraries, during classes, on streets — I always had a hardcover notebook in my bag, in which I recorded the mundane and the absurd, the observed and the projected. Mainly, all my scribbles were about real things I saw and heard, yet it felt as if nothing actually existed until I wrote it down. 

During college and after, I knew I wanted to write — hopefully for a living — but I didn’t know what form that should take. I tried writing fiction, but discovered that I am not at all good at making up stories out of nothing. Other people’s experiences, though, I found endlessly fascinating.

There was a bottomless pool of stories everywhere: a strange exchange at a coffee shop, a suspiciously empty bodega in my neighborhood that somehow remained in business. (Had to be a front, I thought. What a great “This American Life” segment that would be: A look behind the various seemingly innocuous Brooklyn shops like that one that were likely, secretly, fronts for the mafia or drug gangs. Don’t ask me what I planned to do about the extreme danger involved in reporting such a thing. I wasn’t thinking that far ahead.) The world contained more stories than anyone could tell in a lifetime. I just had to pay attention.