Draft Four: 9 storytelling moves I learned from Taylor Swift

Thanks to all of you who, for the past month, went through the four installments of my recent CUNY project, an exploration of how we would need to upgrade our mission, principles, skills, products and metrics if we decided to create a more human-scale type of journalism, which aims to connect people, and be useful in their pursuit of more meaningful lives.

I’ve put them all together in this post, if you want to share the complete version with others. (If you want to skip to the good stuff, just read the last section, a pitch for a pilot I’d like to run in Bucharest in the near future if I find the right partners and enough resources). I’m still behind in replying to all of you who sent feedback and ideas, but I’m making progress. Please keep writing.

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Because we’re entering late-summer melancholy, I’ll keep this one short and sparky.

I’ll take you through 9 things Taylor Swift taught me about storytelling in a pop-listicle format. Yes, the singer-superstar Taylor Swift. Call me a Swiftie if you like, but know my case is a mild one. I just saw her live in Warsaw, on her third consecutive night of playing in front of about 70.000 people. She performed for over three hours, in a show I don’t think I can accurately describe because it was all about the feels. Let’s just say I cried about three-four times, and I could barely move at the end. My Fitbit clocked almost 45.000 steps that day.

For me that was just one night, and Taylor has been on this tour since last year. That is dedication. Let’s get to it:

1. Structure. Often the hardest job of storytelling is organizing the narrative in a coherent way. For The Eras Tour Taylor chose her 18-years of music as a frame and took us on a chronological journey: from teen-love days, to pick-your-adult-self-up moments, to modern midnights of existential questions. It works because good structure does this: it’s sufficiently predictable so you know where it’s going, and simultaneously mysterious enough to make you feel smart if you see something coming.

2. Setting. What distinguishes memorable longform nonfiction from the rest is a story that takes place in a certain place, at a certain time. The characters work through their dilemmas and problems on a stage the author has to set right, because it does influences the narrative. Taylor knows setting: especially on stage. Each era has its own colors, costumes, dances, props, visuals. You are not just listening to the songs live, you are moving through space and time.

3. Style. If you are among the lucky ones, you’ll find your unique voice as a writer. I’m in the camp that believes Taylor is a pretty awesome lyricist, and her bridges are the stuff of legend. She got here by doing this, over and over again. Find that thing that brings you pleasure when writing and do it – even overdo it – until you gain mastery over it.

4. Service. A good story, in my kind of non-fiction at least, is in service of the reader. You are hired to lead a journey, sometimes with the destination unknown. On stage, Taylor is in service to her fans, who trade bracelets, dress up in era-specific outfits, and work extra hard to make it a special night. Much has been written about how strangely intimate she can make a show attended by tens of thousands of people. And she does. She is there for you, and you don’t doubt it for one minute. There were even therapy dogs on site to quell anxiety. Be there for your readers, too.

5. Surprise. A good structure should leave room for surprise. One of Roy Peter Clark’s pieces of wisdom I go back to is about making your readers stumble upon gold coins, meaning unexpected information or moments in your piece. Taylor does this in many ways – her diving into a hole in the stage was neat – but a simpler and more effective one is singing two different songs every night, acoustically: one on guitar, one on piano. Someone told me he wished he caught a concert where she sang Exile – she did that in Warsaw, on piano.

6. Symbolism. In a story there are always some elements that can stand in for the larger idea you want to put across. On stage, colors and props do that nicely, so does a visual of a snake to convey the idea of a slippery and dangerous character – that’s from Taylor’s Reputation era. They also set an internal rhythm and allow a narrative shift from action to reflection.

7. Simplicity. A young journalist once said that her desire was to write simply about complicated things. But simple is not simplistic, and, in my experience, those that meander and have a muddied prose didn’t do enough reporting and don’t have clarity of purpose. It’s usually not the overload of knowledge that prevents them from being simple; it’s the lack of it. Pop is also simple, but mastering the 3-4 minute song requires time, patience, and a lot of exercise.

8. Sparkle. When the confetti dropped at the end of the show, and everyone’s bracelets started flashing, and the performers were taking their bows, everything seemed possible for a moment, and the world was alright. I left the concert grateful for the experience, and wishing we thought of journalism more often as making people feel like they’ve been through an unforgettable experience. The daily problems will be there when you wake up; can I make you forget about them for a little while?

9.  Share. Taylor shared the stage with Paramore, a band I’ve loved for 20 years. She recently announced different extra opening acts for every show in London. There’s a spirit of generosity that carries through, and people reciprocate. You don’t make your own dress for any artist, after all. She has made life in prison easier for some. My friend Laura, who works for USA Today, shared this beautiful intimate story of going to Milan to see Taylor with her 18-yeard old daughter, Lucy. Taylor Swift wasn’t just the world’s biggest pop star: she is also something mothers and daughters share. In Vienna, after Taylor’s shows this week were cancelled because of a terrorist warning, people gathered in the streets, played her songs, and swapped bracelets. “I’m officially a Swiftie”, a friend who was there texted me. “It’s the most wholesome thing in the world.” Can our journalism aim to be more like this?

SIDE DISHES:

1. That Atlantic piece on Arizona. This is a monumental magazine story, nominally about Phoenix, Arizona, but actually about the current and future United States: a country polarized by culture wars, when many day to day problems are different, and left unaddressed: water is disappearing, life is not affordable, and neighbors don’t trust each other.

2. OnlyFans. I bought a hard copy of Wired for the first time in months (years maybe?) and remembered why it used to blow my mind. Did you know OnlyFans models hire companies to impersonate them in DMs, thus selling more of their video inventory? The writer got a job doing this, and you’ll have to read the rest.

3. Hidden Brain. Two wonderful episodes for anyone navigating existential questions. This is about the mental maps we make in our heads (and why it’s important to update them), and this is about being alone (which is not the same as being lonely).

4. Kairos. This novel by Jenny Erpenbeck took me a while to finish because it’s dense, raw and heartbreaking. It’s the tale of two lovers, a complicated relationship in the foreground of the crumbling of East Germany in the late 1980s.

5. Shell Game. You can clone your voice with AI now. Some services do a pretty decent job. You can then upload your cloned voice to a software that turns it into a voice agent, meaning it can take and make calls. Evan Ratliff does this – makes a bunch of voice clones of himself and releases them upon the world. The result is funny, scary, and thought provoking.

6. Tested. Arguably the best series I’ve listened to this year. It’s about women athletes with so-called „difference in sex development”, that many suspect of actually being men. (Spoiler: They’re not!). These are women who men have been policing in sports for over 100 years, under the guise of protecting fairness. But is this really about fairness or is it about control, discrimination, even racism?

7. A bonus for Swifties: the Taffy Brodesser-Akner essay from the New York Times Magazine on what Taylor Swift is all about.

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