What was great about that was that the students at the Transom Workshop were trying to figure out exactly what I needed to figure out as I was just starting a giant new project: how to discover what was at the heart of their stories. But by a very fortuitous coincidence, the very first reporting trip I made for Out on the Wirewas to the Transom Workshop, in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, an eight-week workshop where Rob Rosenthal teaches up-and-coming radio producers how to make better stories. That’s not as easy as it sounds to figure out. Making stories is impossible without them, but you need to water them to figure out which ones are big strong oak trees and which ones are just scraggly little weeds. But even if you’ve got a whole stable of ideas, how do you figure out which ones work, and which ones don’t? How do you know if your idea is even worth pursuing? I’ve talked about how to find and feed an idea, how to identify your taste and pay attention to your attention. How can you get at the crux of what’s so intriguing to you, yourself? Or, perhaps more precisely, how can you make clear to everyone else what it is that makes this idea so gripping for you? Because it’s not always clear to us what it is that keeps us interested in our own work.

But how do you know if you’re on to something that other people will find compelling? You dive in, and go deep, following your taste. It’s the best feeling: You’ve got a big idea. This is part 2 of the Story Building series, based on Out on the Wire.

Trish Trash #2 by Jessica Abel