What if the best storytelling inspiration has been hiding in plain sight this whole time?
The best storytelling advice I’ve ever gotten didn’t come from a bestselling author, a screenwriting class, or a marketing guru.
It came from my neighbor’s Nextdoor post.
I know how that sounds, creepy. But hear me out.
Sometimes the best places for storytelling inspiration are the places you’d least expect.
The truth is, stories are hiding everywhere in plain sight. You just need to know where to look for them.
So today I’m sharing the 6 weirdest places I go for storytelling inspo.
Once you see them, you’ll never scroll past them the same way again.
And you already know I saved the best for last, honestly, part of me wanted to keep this gem all to myself.
Starting with.
Storytelling Inspiration #1: NEXTDOOR APP
You know what might be the most underrated storytelling source on the internet? The Nextdoor App.
Yep, an app where your neighbors argue over garbage cans, complain about fireworks, and ask if anyone else heard “that weird noise” at 2:17 in the morning.
Most people think stories have to be big.
But, honestly, it’s small, everyday, relatable stories that are the most impactful.
Like that time someone wanted to sue their neighbor because the bees they were raising kept “stealing pollen” from their flowers.
Or probably one of the most famous examples is what inspired the Twitter account Best of Nextdoor, which now exists almost entirely because of bizarre neighborhood dramas like this.
A woman became convinced someone was sneaking into her yard at night.
Not to steal anything.
But to rearrange her lawn gnomes.
Every day she’d post another update.
Eventually she started signing the posts from the perspective of each individual gnome.
Or what about the harassment cat?
“For the past 3 weeks a cat had been following me on my daily walks. I’m worried that the owner may have trained the cat to follow people and Rob them when they get home.”
Or one of my personal favorites, Farting in my Mailbox.
“Someone keeps farting in my mail box late at night, I can hear it outside the window and I smell it every time I check my mail. This is getting old and is extremely childish, my bills and coupons smell so bad I can’t even pay them or use them at the grocery store, anyone in my neighborhood keep an eye out for the brown eye. I will catch the flatulent phantom. I have report this information to the police.”
And I literally have no idea how I got through that without laughing.
This proves that a good story doesn’t depend on how big the conflict is.
What matters is the character’s relationship with the problem.
But if you think that’s the only place ordinary people accidentally become great storytellers, you clearly haven’t been reading the right reviews.
Storytelling Inspiration #2: ONE-STAR REVIEWS
If you ever want to see ordinary people accidentally become incredible storytellers.
Read one-star reviews. Five-star reviews can be great, and you might find a few gems here and there.
But the real gold is almost always found when you scroll all the way down to the one-star reviews.
People who are absolutely furious write the best reviews.
Because when people are emotional, they stop listing facts, and start telling stories. And a lot of the times, very detailed stories!
Take the infamous Haribo Sugar-Free Gummy Bears reviews on Amazon.
There are hundreds of full-blown cinematic reviews of the digestive apocalypse that happened after eating the gummy bears.
Some of these reviews are thousands of words long.
But this isn’t limited to Amazon.
This applies to Google, Amazon, Yelp or even your favorite Podcasts, anywhere there is a review to be left, there is story gold.
Someone doesn’t simply say, “The service was bad.”
Instead, they write: “I drove forty minutes, waited outside in the rain, finally got seated, only for the waiter to disappear for thirty minutes while the table next to us got dessert before we even ordered.”
That’s a story.
It’s a relatable experience that can be the basis of an amazing email or even an ad.
And if reviews can turn people into amazing storytellers by accident.
Just imagine what happens when millions of people do it on purpose. Which brings me to Reddit.
Storytelling Inspiration #3: REDDIT
Reddit teaches you that people just can’t resist gossip.
Now, obviously, there are thousands of Reddit threads out there. And honestly, literally any single one of them can have a great story.
But one of my favorite storytelling goldmines on Reddit is a subreddit called r/AmItheAsshole.
And it’s fantastic.
Someone tells a true story from their life and then asks one question:
“Was I wrong?” That’s it.
But thousands of people become completely invested in the story. Not because the stories are necessarily action-packed.
It’s because, again, relatability.
The human experience is full of tension on a daily basis. What we might think of as “small things” are actually the big things that most of us spend our days worrying about.
- Should she have said that?
- Was he justified?
- Who’s actually in the wrong here?
These are the real-life, everyday, so-called “mundane” things that keep us up at night.
So when we read someone else’s story that mirrors our own experiences, we immediately relate.
We even start arguing with it in our own head. We want to resolve the conflict.
Even if it’s not our own.
That’s why “Am I the Asshole” has exploded into one of Reddit’s biggest communities, with tens of millions of members and hundreds of new moral dilemmas posted every single day.
But if you think internet drama is where the strangest stories live.
Wait until you see what’s hiding on Wikipedia.
Storytelling Inspiration #4: WIKIPEDIA
Okay, okay, so first of all, can we all give a collective shout out to Wikipedia.
Free and still being run by humans, not machines. Go support them and keep them going!
Now don’t judge me for this, but.
Wikipedia’s “List of Unusual Deaths” is one of my favorite pages to browse through.
I also really like their “Unusual Articles” page.
These pages are storytelling gold.
Where else would you learn about The Panotti?
A mythical race of people whose ears were as long as their bodies?
And let’s be honest, real life is often stranger than fiction.
Take Bobby Leach.
If you’ve never heard of him, he was the second person in history to survive going over Niagara Falls.
Inside a barrel.
He survived something almost nobody else on Earth had survived.
And then a few years later he died, after slipping on an orange peel.
I mean that is an incredible story that I couldn’t make up even if I tried.
I love reading these pages because it reminds you that the world doesn’t follow perfect story structure.
As storytellers, we’re always trying to invent twists and construct the perfect story arch from scratch.
But sometimes the best stories are inspired just from reading about a strange myth, or an ending you never saw coming.
So if the internet’s weirdest corners can teach us this much about storytelling, imagine what one of the oldest, most overlooked sources has to offer.
Storytelling Inspiration #5: LOCAL NEWSPAPERS
One of my favorite places to find storytelling inspiration is one of the oldest sources that almost nobody thinks to check anymore.
Your local newspaper.
Like this story in the Daily Herald about a little girl walking with her aunt who spotted four ducklings stranded beside a busy road.
They started knocking on strangers’ doors asking for help.
Soon, neighbors they had never met were stopping traffic, carrying ducklings across the road, and wading into a marsh to reunite them with their mother.
When they finally released the ducklings back into the pond everyone started crying and high-fiving.
Or here’s another one.
The Los Angeles Times recently covered the retirement of a mailman named John Ayala.
On paper, that’s not exactly headline material.
“A mail carrier retires after 42 years.”
Cool.
But the story wasn’t about retirement, it was about the relationships he’d built.
More than 200 people showed up to his retirement party.
People he’d watched grow up.
Families he’d known for decades.
Neighbors who said he made their community feel like a community.
It’s not a story about a job. It’s a story about impact.
Almost every great story is hiding inside an ordinary one.
You just have to know where to look.
And as promised.
The absolute best hidden gem on the internet for storytelling inspiration.
Storytelling Inspiration #6: FMYLIFE
Just spend 5 minutes on the site and you’ll find unforgettable story after unforgettable story.
But again, it’s not because these stories are ultra-dramatic or even unbelievable.
It’s because they are ordinary moments.
And that is exactly what makes them both so hilarious and so relatable at the same time.
Every post is describing one painfully awkward, ironic or just plain hilarious, yet unfortunate, moment in someone’s life.
And the best part is that they are just a few sentences long. So they are quick to skim through.
This one made me laugh out loud.
“Today, I was proud of myself for remembering my wallet, keys and phone before leaving for the airport. I got all the way to security before realizing I’d left my passport on the kitchen table, right next to the travel mug I also forgot to bring. FML.”
Yep, super relatable.
Or this one.
“Today, I accidentally liked a social media post from 2017 while scrolling through someone’s profile. I panicked and blocked him. Then I remembered blocking him wouldn’t stop the notification, so I just shut my phone off and unsuccessfully tried to convince myself that it never happened. FML.”
I mean who hasn’t done this? Be honest.
These tiny moments are things that almost all of us have experienced in one way or another.
And that is exactly why they work.
They remind us that great stories don’t have to be extraordinary.
They just have to make people think: Omg, I’ve totally been there.
That’s when they stop reading your story as an outsider, and they start experiencing it.
Until next time, I’m Alex. Ciao for now!
