Brandon Stanton's Advice on Storytelling: The Humans of New York Method

Brandon Stanton created Humans of New York, one of the most popular storytelling projects ever made. Over 20 million people follow his work across platforms. He has published five books. He turned street photography into narrative art by walking up to strangers, asking them to share their stories, and editing their words into something that millions of people read from beginning to end.

"I very intentionally removed myself from the work because I thought it was better that way." People still come up to him and ask, "Do you work for Humans of New York?" The art gets better the less of him that is in it.

The Difference Between a Persona and a Person

Every interview begins with a negotiation. The person presents what Stanton calls "the business card version of themselves." The part they put on social media. Someone who has it all together.

"There is a negotiation process at the beginning of every interview where that person is presenting a version of themselves that they would like to be seen as. Then with sustained attention, with follow-up questions, with interest, you unpack that. You get below that."

The answers start coming out more slowly. There are pauses. The person thinks about things they have never been asked to articulate before.

"Truth is often spoken haltingly, with pauses, like it's being dug up one spoonful at a time from somewhere deep. Truth feels heavy. It has gravity. It's usually not floating on the surface."

Follow the Heat

Stanton does not prepare questions. His only tool is curiosity and presence.

"I'm just extremely present trying to understand what it is like to be this person. That involves zero preparation, an extreme amount of active listening, and just a level of presence that I think people aren't used to."

When something catches his attention, he calls it "following the heat." You feel the tug. You lean in. You ask another question about that specific thing. If Stanton is hooked, the reader will be hooked too.

"If you will find somebody's struggle, you will find a plot. Find what this person has pushed against, find what this person has overcome, and you will have a story with a plot."

Struggle gives you plot (they wanted something and faced resistance), transformation (you cannot push against something without being changed by it), and wisdom (this is the thing they have thought about the most).

Singularity Is the Goal

"Cliches, generalities, they put you in a pool of other people. This person would say that. This person would have written this. You protect yourself from any sort of exposure or vulnerability by aligning yourself with people who've done things in very similar ways."

"I know the interview is going very well when I've gotten to a place where I've interviewed 10,000 people all over the world, but this person in front of me right now is telling me something I haven't heard before."

He gives the example of Tanqueray, a woman he met randomly on the street in Chelsea. She pulled him into conversation with: "Why is it that only white boys wear shorts in the winter?" Then she launched into monologues about being a burlesque dancer in the 1970s. Her voice was completely distinctive. "My stripper name was Tanqueray. Back in the 70s I was the only black girl making white girl money."

The singularity of her voice kept him coming back for months of interviews. He turned it into a 33-part Instagram series that millions read from beginning to end.

The Oral Tradition

Every story Stanton has published was first told to him by voice.

"Hemingway said that you can write spoken or you can write written. I think in my head, I'm always coming back to the rhythm and cadence of spoken word. That's one, how stories were shared for millions of years, and two, how they've been shared with me for the last 15 years of my life."

"These are the elements that I think make a story feel so real. This is something being spoken to you for the very first time, as opposed to something that somebody went into a room and wrote to be the most distilled and polished version of their thoughts possible."

From the Dear New York prologue: "New York is humanity itself. Every type of person is here. Every culture, every religion, every viewpoint. And all of us crowded onto the same narrow sidewalks, the same one-way streets, the same subway cars." It reads like someone talking, not someone composing.

Learn What a Story Cannot Do Without

Before writing long-form, Stanton spent years writing single-paragraph captions constrained to 2,200 characters.

"It's a whole process of learning what the story cannot do without, as opposed to what you want to include. It gives you an education in the bones of storytelling."

Aaron Sorkin told him plot is the clothesline. Character building, exposition, poetic observations - those are the clothespins. "Without a character who has a need, a desire, something that they want, there is no forward track to move along."

Stakes do not need to be dramatic. Getting sober. Getting your first girlfriend. Wanting your son to enjoy dinner tonight.

Empathy Through Specificity

"Had you been born in their shoes and walked their path, you might be a lot like them. If you had been born on the small island of Leguan in the middle of the Essequibo River near the northern coast of Guyana, to a mother who told you on the day you left for America to hold on to God with all your body, all your soul, then you, too, might be shouting the gospel as the woman is currently doing in car number two."

Not "we are all the same." But "if I had all the same inputs, I would be a lot like this person." Generic empathy is easy and hollow. Empathy built on knowing someone's actual story is hard and real.

Show Up Every Day

"If you want to be a writer, it's writing a certain amount of hours every single day. That's the only way I know how to do it. It involves too much doubt, too much insecurity if you're judging yourself on anything else. You got to judge yourself by showing up."

"If you wrote for an hour a day, you're a writer. Congratulations. And if you've won Pulitzer Prizes but you haven't written in a year, there's a sixteen-year-old girl writing in her journal that is more of a writer than you are."

"That creed and that viewpoint has carried me to the top of some very tall mountains, but the entire way up, I'm looking down at my feet. I can take one more step today."

For more on personal writing and getting honest on the page, see Rob Henderson's advice on writing a memoir. And for the structural principles that make stories work, read Michael Dean's 27 patterns to fix bad writing.

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