LRN No.14: slow cooked stories
Plus: exclusive giveaway bonanza for LRN subscribers
My little red notebooks are full of ideas that sometimes stay there for years before the time is right for them to come into the open.
My current workload is a case in point:
Today, I’m writing a story for the Guardian’s Saturday magazine that first went onto my ideas list in 2017
I’m doing interviews for a piece for The Sunday Times Magazine that comes from an idea from 2016
I began the reporting for my book, The Price of Life, in 2019 - and it’s out in March
I’m going through edits on a piece for the Guardian’s The Long Read section for which I had to wait ten years before I got access to the story. TEN WHOLE YEARS.
There are many reasons why things can take so long:
Sometimes you need to wait for your interviewees to be ready to talk: they might be on probation and unable to speak to journalists until it’s over, or they might be scientists researching some ground-breaking, transformative new treatment who only want to speak about it when their results are about to be published.
Sometimes you have to wait for it to be the right time to tell the story, for something else to happen in the news that gives that idea new salience and relevance.
Sometimes you have to wait for another idea to join the story and keep it proper company, so that it can become a book, or a podcast series, or a TV show.
I am generally quite an impatient person, but I can take all the time in the world when it comes to stories. The joy of telling the right one, in the right way, at the right time, is worth any wait. And it makes me more determined than ever to do the best job I can when I do finally get to tell it.
But you don’t have to wait to get your hands on my book (see what I did there?) even though it’s not out until 14th March. Enter my competition to get a signed copy before it reaches bookshops!
Five signed uncorrected proofs of The Price of Life, complete with typos, are up for grabs. To enter you need to:
subscribe to this newsletter (and if you’re reading this in an email you’re already there)
follow me on Twitter (yes, it is still called Twitter)
retweet this tweet currently on my feed telling everyone about this competition.
The competition will close at 2pm on Friday 26th January 2024. Five lucky winners will be picked at random, and notified by email. Open to UK entrants only. Entrants must be 18+.
Share the love - forward this email to anyone who might enjoy a journey into what human beings are worth today, and who decides that price. (Or keep it to yourself to maximise your chances of winning. Actually, don’t do that.)
Things that have caught my eyes and ears:
Not much, this time, because I was a judge on an awards panel and had to spend seven hours of my free time watching submissions. But I still managed to catch:
Your Fat Friend, Jeanie Finlay’s documentary about Aubrey Gordon, followed by a hilarious Q&A at Picturehouse Central. A film about fatness, family and fame that stayed with me for days afterwards
(I’ve loved Jeanie’s work ever since I saw The Great Hip Hop Hoax at Sheffield Doc Fest in 2013,. It tells the story of how two lads from Dundee managed to fool the record industry - and MTV - into believing they were rappers from California. Very happy to see that it’s still on iPlayer)
This auction catalogue for items once used as props on Succession. $3,438 for an ATN mug, anyone?