Brandon Stanton
Creator of Humans of New York and author of five books
Where to hear and read about Brandon Stanton1 episode or test
Brandon Stanton created Humans of New York, which grew from a plan to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers into long street interviews, serialized stories and five books. The thing most worth learning from him is to find a person's struggle beneath the polished persona and to judge yourself only by the work you show up to do each day.
The one thing that you can be proud of without ego is the amount of work that you do, because that is something that is freely available to everybody.
How to Write Powerful Stories — Brandon Stanton
Brandon Stanton: the story and the lessons
1How Brandon Stanton built Humans of New York
Stanton set out to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers and rebuild the city through them. He came to New York from Philly with no money and a plan to photograph 30 to 40 people a day. He wanted only enough income to photograph all day, not followers or money.
It began just before social media took off, when he was trying to make a blog.
The work moved steadily from photographs toward interviews and writing. Short chats became transcribed quotes, then long interviews about deep themes and arcs. His formats grew from single quotes to paragraphs, a 33-part story, a 54-part story and a 12,000-word prologue.
The 33-part story ran as Instagram posts over a week, and millions read it start to finish. He sees it as his push against the limits of what a writer can do on social media.
Unlimited interview time during COVID let him build long, architected stories. He took about 22,000 submissions and interviewed people remotely with no rush. That led to five-part stories and then the 54-part story last year.
Writing short first had taught him the bones of a story, so he could build a larger body around them.
Stanton removed himself from the work on purpose. He found the art improved the less of him was in it, so he kept his name out of Humans of New York. For years people did not know it, and some asked how to get a job at the project.
He wanted to be a channel and less of a source. He admits each story still carries a touch of his own autobiography in what he chooses to dig into.
He wrote Dear New York to escape the algorithm's shaping of his work. Distribution now depends on how long people look at a post, so very short, poetic quotes no longer spread. His posting dipped sharply for 2 or 3 years while he wrote the book, and 75% of its stories never ran online.
He wanted to escape the 'subconscious sculpting mechanism' of the algorithm, which shapes what you write. The book let him use shorter, more open lines that need no justification.
2How Stanton interviews a stranger from zero
Stanton prepares nothing and tells people they can skip any question. He opens by saying anything they don't want to answer, they don't have to. Almost nobody uses the option, because they want to understand themselves too.
Journalists who interviewed the same people right after him got a remarkable shift in energy. They arrive with a list of questions to fill gaps in an article already half written in their heads.
He expects truth to arrive late, after the polished persona. People open with a 'business card version' of themselves. Truth comes slowly, with pauses, 'one spoonful at a time', once sustained attention reaches things they have never been asked to think about.
The more public the person, the harder the negotiation. He leaves with a transcript of about 20 pages and carves out one illustrative moment.
Stanton follows the heat: he asks about whatever makes him lean in. He listens for the moment he thinks 'wait, that happened?' and treats that reaction as a proxy for the reader. After about 10,000 interviews, hearing something new is the sign it is going well.
"I just call it following the heat."
He looks for the person's struggle, because it holds the plot. A struggle gives a story its plot, its change and its wisdom, since nobody battles something for years without being changed. The most common long story he hears is someone getting sober.
"If you can find somebody's struggle, you will find a plot."
He presses people to explain where their story contradicts itself. If someone calls their mother horrible and then tells a compassionate story about her, he asks how that fits. The aim is a new synthesis with deeper resonance than the first version.
He says a curated story is 'a truth, but it's not always truth'. Some interviewees find him intense, and he believes taking them that seriously honors them.
Stanton writes the story with his questions while he interviews. Once he sees the plot and arc, he asks for description: what they wore and what they looked like then. The habit came from noticing after many interviews what he wished he had asked.
He adjusts his tone to the person, since a group of young men on 182nd Street needs different energy than an 80-year-old woman in Jackson Heights.
He prefers the insecure person who thinks they have nothing to say. The confident person may have built a false version of themselves. Bad interviews are people with a lot to say, none of it deeply earned.
His example of an earned truth is a self-taught man who bottomed out in a park at 24 and said 'even death didn't want me'.
3Stanton's rules for writing a powerful story
Stanton cuts cliches until only this person could have said it. Cliches and generalities put you in a pool of other people and protect you from exposure. Stephanie, a former burlesque dancer, showed a whole voice in about 10 words: 'I was the only black girl making white girl money.'
The best subjects have a singular story and a singular voice together, which he calls absolute magic.
Give a character a clear want before adding anything else. Aaron Sorkin taught him that plot is the clothesline and exposition and character are the clothespins. A want met or disappointed many times gives the reader forward motion.
The want can be small, like a first girlfriend or a good dinner. Plot matters only in the 12 to 14 longer stories, since a single quote can just hold a thought.
He writes for the ear, keeping the rhythm of spoken word. Every story he shares was told to him aloud. He wanted the first-person Dear New York prologue to share the texture of the other 500 stories, as if told for the first time.
David Perell was pulled into the Grand Central exhibition by the rhythm of its opening paragraph.
He builds a city from a rolling list of concrete examples. The prologue rides the seven train and bounces between about 30 lives to sum up New York through its parts. Any city can take the same list of sidewalks, one-way streets and subway cars.
It works because he has stopped 10,000 strangers over 15 years.
He learned story structure by writing short. Telling stories in a paragraph taught him what a story cannot do without. In your own life everything seems essential, so the editor's job is to find what can't be lost.
With the bones learned, he builds a bigger body around them in long form.
The Dear New York prologue went through 180 drafts. Stanton says he is not someone who gets a bolt of inspiration and writes it out. He shows up and iterates.
The 12,000-word prologue starts with a baby, sends out many threads and weaves them back into the final scene. Keeping it as one piece was the hardest part.
He treats every writing rule as optional if the result works. He read 100 pages a day for years, then 150 to 200 works of fiction recently. The lesson was that second person, odd punctuation or any form works if done well.
He warns that art school and MFAs can leave a rigid idea of quality that leads away from experimentation. "Anything is allowed if you do it well."
4Why Stanton judges himself by showing up
After flunking out, he stopped asking if he was a good writer. In school he skimmed the back of a book before a test and still got a B or A minus. After flunking out he saw he wasn't educated, and he rooted his identity in daily work instead.
He started with 100 pages of reading a day, then 30 to 40 photographs a day, then four interviews a day for years without missing one.
He breaks a big dream into behaviors he can repeat daily. The goal of 10,000 portraits became a daily count. Effort is the one measure fully in his control, so it is the one he can be proud of without ego.
By this standard, a Pulitzer winner who has not written in a year is less of a writer than a 16-year-old keeping a journal.
Stanton believed his art was beautiful long before anyone else did. Tied to people's reception, he says, you run out of gas. Rooting the work in the doing kept him going long enough for others to agree.
He contrasts this with algorithm-built content like 'you're never going to believe what he just said'. The creed carried him up tall mountains while he only looked at his feet: 'I can take one more step today.'
How to Write Powerful Stories — Brandon Stanton
Brandon Stanton explains how he turns hour-long street conversations with strangers into short, singular stories, and why he roots his writing in daily work instead of talent or reception. The technique worth hearing is following the heat in an interview to find someone's struggle, which gives a story its plot, its change and its wisdom.
Stanton set out to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers and rebuild the city through them. He came to New York from Philly with no money and a plan to photograph 30 to 40 people a day. He wanted only enough income to photograph all day, not followers or money.
It began just before social media took off, when he was trying to make a blog.
The work moved steadily from photographs toward interviews and writing. Short chats became transcribed quotes, then long interviews about deep themes and arcs. His formats grew from single quotes to paragraphs, a 33-part story, a 54-part story and a 12,000-word prologue.
The 33-part story ran as Instagram posts over a week, and millions read it start to finish. He sees it as his push against the limits of what a writer can do on social media.
Unlimited interview time during COVID let him build long, architected stories. He took about 22,000 submissions and interviewed people remotely with no rush. That led to five-part stories and then the 54-part story last year.
Writing short first had taught him the bones of a story, so he could build a larger body around them.
Stanton removed himself from the work on purpose. He found the art improved the less of him was in it, so he kept his name out of Humans of New York. For years people did not know it, and some asked how to get a job at the project.
He wanted to be a channel and less of a source. He admits each story still carries a touch of his own autobiography in what he chooses to dig into.
He wrote Dear New York to escape the algorithm's shaping of his work. Distribution now depends on how long people look at a post, so very short, poetic quotes no longer spread. His posting dipped sharply for 2 or 3 years while he wrote the book, and 75% of its stories never ran online.
He wanted to escape the 'subconscious sculpting mechanism' of the algorithm, which shapes what you write. The book let him use shorter, more open lines that need no justification.
Stanton prepares nothing and tells people they can skip any question. He opens by saying anything they don't want to answer, they don't have to. Almost nobody uses the option, because they want to understand themselves too.
Journalists who interviewed the same people right after him got a remarkable shift in energy. They arrive with a list of questions to fill gaps in an article already half written in their heads.
He expects truth to arrive late, after the polished persona. People open with a 'business card version' of themselves. Truth comes slowly, with pauses, 'one spoonful at a time', once sustained attention reaches things they have never been asked to think about.
The more public the person, the harder the negotiation. He leaves with a transcript of about 20 pages and carves out one illustrative moment.
Stanton follows the heat: he asks about whatever makes him lean in. He listens for the moment he thinks 'wait, that happened?' and treats that reaction as a proxy for the reader. After about 10,000 interviews, hearing something new is the sign it is going well.
"I just call it following the heat."
He looks for the person's struggle, because it holds the plot. A struggle gives a story its plot, its change and its wisdom, since nobody battles something for years without being changed. The most common long story he hears is someone getting sober.
"If you can find somebody's struggle, you will find a plot."
He presses people to explain where their story contradicts itself. If someone calls their mother horrible and then tells a compassionate story about her, he asks how that fits. The aim is a new synthesis with deeper resonance than the first version.
He says a curated story is 'a truth, but it's not always truth'. Some interviewees find him intense, and he believes taking them that seriously honors them.
Stanton writes the story with his questions while he interviews. Once he sees the plot and arc, he asks for description: what they wore and what they looked like then. The habit came from noticing after many interviews what he wished he had asked.
He adjusts his tone to the person, since a group of young men on 182nd Street needs different energy than an 80-year-old woman in Jackson Heights.
He prefers the insecure person who thinks they have nothing to say. The confident person may have built a false version of themselves. Bad interviews are people with a lot to say, none of it deeply earned.
His example of an earned truth is a self-taught man who bottomed out in a park at 24 and said 'even death didn't want me'.
Stanton cuts cliches until only this person could have said it. Cliches and generalities put you in a pool of other people and protect you from exposure. Stephanie, a former burlesque dancer, showed a whole voice in about 10 words: 'I was the only black girl making white girl money.'
The best subjects have a singular story and a singular voice together, which he calls absolute magic.
Give a character a clear want before adding anything else. Aaron Sorkin taught him that plot is the clothesline and exposition and character are the clothespins. A want met or disappointed many times gives the reader forward motion.
The want can be small, like a first girlfriend or a good dinner. Plot matters only in the 12 to 14 longer stories, since a single quote can just hold a thought.
He writes for the ear, keeping the rhythm of spoken word. Every story he shares was told to him aloud. He wanted the first-person Dear New York prologue to share the texture of the other 500 stories, as if told for the first time.
David Perell was pulled into the Grand Central exhibition by the rhythm of its opening paragraph.
He builds a city from a rolling list of concrete examples. The prologue rides the seven train and bounces between about 30 lives to sum up New York through its parts. Any city can take the same list of sidewalks, one-way streets and subway cars.
It works because he has stopped 10,000 strangers over 15 years.
He learned story structure by writing short. Telling stories in a paragraph taught him what a story cannot do without. In your own life everything seems essential, so the editor's job is to find what can't be lost.
With the bones learned, he builds a bigger body around them in long form.
The Dear New York prologue went through 180 drafts. Stanton says he is not someone who gets a bolt of inspiration and writes it out. He shows up and iterates.
The 12,000-word prologue starts with a baby, sends out many threads and weaves them back into the final scene. Keeping it as one piece was the hardest part.
He treats every writing rule as optional if the result works. He read 100 pages a day for years, then 150 to 200 works of fiction recently. The lesson was that second person, odd punctuation or any form works if done well.
He warns that art school and MFAs can leave a rigid idea of quality that leads away from experimentation. "Anything is allowed if you do it well."
After flunking out, he stopped asking if he was a good writer. In school he skimmed the back of a book before a test and still got a B or A minus. After flunking out he saw he wasn't educated, and he rooted his identity in daily work instead.
He started with 100 pages of reading a day, then 30 to 40 photographs a day, then four interviews a day for years without missing one.
He breaks a big dream into behaviors he can repeat daily. The goal of 10,000 portraits became a daily count. Effort is the one measure fully in his control, so it is the one he can be proud of without ego.
By this standard, a Pulitzer winner who has not written in a year is less of a writer than a 16-year-old keeping a journal.
Stanton believed his art was beautiful long before anyone else did. Tied to people's reception, he says, you run out of gas. Rooting the work in the doing kept him going long enough for others to agree.
He contrasts this with algorithm-built content like 'you're never going to believe what he just said'. The creed carried him up tall mountains while he only looked at his feet: 'I can take one more step today.'