Two years ago I was a stranger to the staff at This American Life. I sent them an unsolicited tape that they liked and Ira asked me to pitch stories to them. A few months later, I did my first reporter piece for the show. After I did a couple more pieces, they hired me as their intern. Now I'm a regular contributor.
When I was an intern, I read many unsolicited submissions. I was shocked by how few of the submissions were appropriate for This American Life. A lot of the pieces were well-written, but they didn’t seem to take into account what the show is, and what makes it different from any other show on the radio. Almost every cover letter said that the material enclosed was "perfect" for This American Life. But after reading or listening to the submission, I wondered if they'd ever actually heard the show.
It’s possible to get on This American Life with no prior experience. But you do need to follow a few guidelines. Here's what you need to know to get on the show.
Read. The transcript of Ira’s speech "More, Better Radio," This American Life’s comic book "Radio: An Illustrated Guide," Transom's great resources, and This American Life’s Submissions Guidelines tell you everything you need to know. They’re all on This American Life’s website and they make clear exactly what the show is looking for in a story. This may seem too obvious to say, but just in case: getting on the show is just like getting a job anywhere – you figure out what they’re looking for and you try to give them what they want. Specifically, This American Life is looking for stories with two main elements: the narrative action, or plot (in which one thing happens to the characters, and then another, and then another), and moments of reflection (where someone says something surprising about what the story might mean). In his speech, Ira even talks about how to get certain kinds of specific details into a story, and how quickly the plot points need to happen (as fast as every 45 seconds). When I was reading submissions, I couldn’t believe how little people had done to figure out what the show wanted. Most people seemed to send the show whatever they had lying around, and just hoped they’d get lucky.
Be brief. Often, we’ll receive an entire book or an hour–long tape. Sometimes we’ll skim a long submission, but if nothing jumps out at us right away, we tend to move on. If there is a smaller segment that the writer feels would be appropriate for the show, it'd be smart to either highlight that part or send just the excerpt. If in fact there is a ten minute radio story in there – or even a 55 minute radio story – you have a better chance of getting it on the air if you help us find it. Remember, you’re writing to someone who’s sifting through a huge pile of submissions. Make it easy for someone to accept your work.
Make sure your story is universal. A lot of people send TAL stories from their own lives. Lots of these stories are interesting, lots of them are funny, many are sad. But the problem with nearly all of them, from a TAL point of view, is that they lack some moment of reflection, some thought about how this story represents a universal experience lots of people have.
For what it's worth, this is something the producers of the show struggle with themselves. They'll have some story that they know is fun to listen to, that they know must mean something bigger, but it's not exactly clear at the beginning what that something might be.
Without some bigger point like this, some moment of reflection, these stories come off like a private joke that the listener isn’t in on. That's what a lot of the submissions seem like. I wonder if we all hear people like David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell on the air, and get fooled into thinking that the personal stories they tell are just that – personal stories – without noticing how often they jump to big universal ideas anyone can relate to.
The kind of moment I'm talking about is in nearly every story on the show, sometimes more explicitly, sometimes not. Sometimes the narrator makes the Big Point, sometimes an interviewee makes it. Usually, the story that opens each show makes its Big Point in a very obvious sort of way. At the top of the "Cringe" show, there's a funny story that leads to Ira pondering why it is we cringe, why we have this physical response to embarassing moments. He says: "A cringe is basically the human body cowering in fear – for an instant . And one of the most fearsome, stressful things we can encounter – is the thought that we are not who we think we are. The thought that the world sees us differently than we see ourselves."
Surprise your reader. Tell us something we’ve never heard before. Don’t confuse "surprising" with "crazy" or "wacky." We often get submissions from people who I think are trying to be surprising, but the way they present it, it seems like the main point of the story is, "This crazy thing happened to me, you wouldn’t believe it!" There was a woman who was cheated on eBay in a weird way. There was a guy who was hitchhiking across the country and he got picked up by someone he’d known in middle school, completely by chance. Crazy can be funny and crazy can be poignant. But crazy without reflection is two-dimensional. If some amazing coincidence happens, it only works as a fully-developed story if someone makes an interesting conclusion about it, or if it says something about human nature.
The kind of surprise we’re looking for at This American Life is the kind that Ira talks about in his speech, in the comic book, and in our Submissions Guidelines. The story needs to document some feeling or situation we don’t usually talk about. We need to feel that the character is taking some risk...or they’re on a quest...often, it’s simply answering the question: what do you make of that? It's the difference between complaining in a story about the bad relationships you keep falling into and figuring out WHY that keeps happening, and developing a surprising picture of how relationships work.
Don’t give up. I sent stories for over a year before anything was accepted. I even had the embarrassing experience of reading an article in the New York Times about This American Life, in which the writer tried to capture just how inadequate some of the unsolicited submissions were – and to do that, he quoted mine. The producers sometimes sent encouraging advice along with my rejection letters. If this happens to you, take their advice into account before you resubmit.