Eli Qian

Dec 7 2022

Zoom in

Another post inspired by Serial. I just finished season 3, the one about courthouses, and a line from the last episode that stood out to me was that the producers didn’t seek out stories from the biggest, most “exciting” courts in the country. They got everything from a single building in Cleveland—and not a particularly well-known building.

On the surface, an ordinary courthouse in an ordinary city. However, they were still able to find deep and interesting stories. This got me thinking about the relationship between specificity/depth and creativity.

When we zoom out, it seems like all the stories are in the most exciting places. Regular life doesn’t feel like it contains anything special. But when we zoom in, enough to dive into the intricacies and details, suddenly everything is interesting.

A random person crossing the street has a literal lifetime of experience that shaped them in profound ways. The house you live in has many stories—the land it was built on, the economic forces that drove its construction, the neighborhood it's in, and the people that used to inhabit it.

At the macro level, we make many assumptions about how the world works. We don’t find it necessary to inspect every detail and decision. If we did, we’d find many unusual or unexplained things—the stuff of stories.

Depth and specificity also make creative endeavors more approachable. You don’t need to break open a national scandal to be interesting. Start with one mundane thing in one mundane place. There is a richness to everything around us.