“WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS?” One of the (several) points of contact between fiction and journalism is the way stories begin.

When I was just starting to work on the Yale Free Press, I remember the editor-in-chief would point out various campus hijinks and ask, “So what’s our angle?” Every event on campus was a potential story. But the story wasn’t just “what happened”–that’s boring, and anyway, other people could do that better than we could. Our stories started with the “angle”–the unexpected or overlooked meaning, the hidden connections and political or philosophical resonance that we could bring to an otherwise banal story.

This Peter David post, which I’ve linked before, reminds us that we’re surrounded by stories. All we have to do is look journalistically–look for the angle.