New York
Can Faster Buses Really Be Free?
On a rough day, a bus ride in New York starts like this:
Then there are the traffic jams …
the mistimed stop lights …
the bunched-up buses …
and the cars blocking the bus lane.
Zohran Mamdani has made this grim experience central to his pledge to improve city life. Can his bus plan actually do that?
Some of the slowest buses in America plod through New York, stopping and starting, bunching and idling, at about eight miles per hour on average. Speeds have improved little over the past decade. The least reliable buses seldom show up on time.
Zohran Mamdani has built a strikingly successful mayoral campaign by tapping frustration with this system and marrying it to his broader campaign pledge to make New York more affordable.
“Fast and free buses,” he has promised, the two goals always locked together.
Get rid of fares, in theory, and that should speed things up, ending the backlog of riders lined up at every stop. More bus lanes and better infrastructure could bolster those gains. And making buses free would be a boon, Mr. Mamdani argues, for New Yorkers who have said in surveys that they’ve often struggled to come up with fare money.
“Today in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one in five New Yorkers cannot afford the bus fare,” Mr. Mamdani said, defending his plan in the campaign’s final debate last week. Give people back that money, and more of their time, he suggests, and the economic benefits for the city would outweigh even the cost of a fare-free program he estimates could run $700 million a year.
Critics, and even some transit advocates, warn that his two goals are in tension: Spend such vast sums subsidizing the bus, and there won’t be much left over to improve it, especially at a time when the federal government is undercutting support for transit and the economy is shaky. Under any reasonable estimate, the annual cost to the city of making buses free would be more than transit officials expect to raise this year from congestion pricing, the Manhattan tolling program in the middle of its own political fight.
Whether fast buses and free ones can really go together depends on many questions, some beyond a mayor’s control, including whether Gov. Kathy Hochul would cooperate on higher taxes to raise revenue. Even if Mr. Mamdani were able to eliminate fares, what effect would it really have? And would it be enough to change the slog of riding a bus in the city?
Free and maybe faster
To understand the ambition of Mr. Mamdani’s plan, it’s helpful to first take in the vastness of New York’s bus network. It’s at a whole other scale from the subway system (and from any city currently running free buses):
Mr. Mamdani, who is the front-runner in the Nov. 4 general election, first championed the idea of free buses by pushing for a one-year pilot that made a single route in each borough free for one year starting in September 2023. Expanding the idea citywide would cover 340 routes that carry about 1.5 million paid trips per weekday.
Those rides represent a lot of money that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the bus and subway systems, would no longer be collecting at the fare box. The fare today is $2.90, set to rise to $3 in January (although the actual fare collected per paying rider is more like $1.90, after accounting for free transfers and discounted fare cards). If the city were to pay for this instead, the total cost would depend on ridership numbers.
The M.T.A. says the cost of a free-fare program is probably higher than Mr. Mamdani’s estimate. As the authority cracks down on fare evasion, and ridership and fares increase, it projects that by 2028 the annual bus fare revenue, including paratransit, could exceed $1 billion — much higher than the campaign’s numbers.
About a quarter of bus riders also transfer to the subway. And if they haven’t paid for the first leg of the trip, the M.T.A. fears that more passengers may be inclined to skip the train fare, too.
John J. McCarthy, chief of policy and external relations at the M.T.A., said in a statement that the authority was pleased with the attention that transit has gotten in the mayoral race, but also expressed caution about making the buses free without more study.
“Why is congestion pricing successful? Because we took the time to study its benefits and impacts,” he said about the yearslong review for the toll program. “This proposal would demand the same kind of rigorous analysis.”
Still, the Mamdani campaign says the overall cost is relatively small — less than 1 percent of the city’s annual budget. But for the M.T.A., fare revenue covers about 19 percent of its $4.8 billion bus operating budget.
Mr. Mamdani suggests that the economic benefits of free fares could be twice as large as the costs. That’s hard to evaluate (the figure includes assigning a dollar value to the time you’d save by spending less of it stuck on the bus). His other claim is that eliminating the fare would itself speed up the buses.
That is theoretically true. All those seconds it can take each passenger to root around in a pocket, count out change or fuss with the card reader — at every stop — add up to real delays. And just one rider doing this can be the difference between making and missing a green light.
But New York’s own pilot program illustrates one hitch. Across all five free routes, ridership increased during the pilot by about 30 to 40 percent, mostly driven by existing riders taking more trips. The buses, however, actually slowed, because all those new riders still had to board the bus and request stops, offsetting the time savings from getting rid of fares.
That’s another complication: If ridership rises substantially, you have to add service to keep up with it, or you may not see any speed benefits. And that costs money, too.
Mr. Mamdani cites an estimate that free buses could shave 12 percent off trip times. The number comes from Charles Komanoff, a longtime transit advocate and mathematician whose traffic modeling helped inform congestion pricing. He first tried to assess the impact of free buses in 2007, as part of a study of whether congestion pricing could generate enough revenue to make transit free.
“That idea of free transit — it was visionary, it was lovely, it was beguiling,” Mr. Komanoff recalled recently. Politically at the time, though, “it was completely impractical.”
He put down the idea for nearly two decades. Then last December, he heard Mr. Mamdani, polling at the time in single digits, talk about free buses at a mayoral transit forum.
In April, Mr. Komanoff published a new report that is the closest thing to a white paper for the Mamdani campaign on the topic. His 12 percent time savings relies on some of his 2007-era data (bus riders then dipped a card instead of tapping it). This fall, he reran his analysis again, after riding the B41 bus in Brooklyn with The New York Times to collect new data. He estimates that ending fares could cut 7 percent off a trip on the route, assuming the ridership stays constant. That would still be, he said, “a triumph” — an improvement akin to what drivers have seen inside Manhattan’s congestion zone.
Faster but not free
The B41 bus, connecting the Flatbush commercial corridor to Downtown Brooklyn, is one of the busiest routes in the city. The comptroller’s office gives it a D grade for its poor on-time performance and high rate of “bunching” — when buses arrive too close together and disrupt scheduling. On the route’s slowest stretch, speeds dip below four m.p.h.
Flatbush Avenue is, in short, a prime target for redesign and better bus service — something the New York City Department of Transportation has already begun to work on. And it’s a prominent example of how buses could be made faster without killing the fare box.
We rode the corridor, timed how long it takes riders to board the bus, counted all the intersections, and worked with the transportation planner Annie Weinstock to analyze the route. A trip in the evening rush hour covering the Flatbush portion of the B41 takes 58 minutes on average. But if the bus were traveling the corridor totally unimpeded, it would need only 16 minutes to go from end to end. Everything else is a form of delay: The bus spends more time sitting at red lights, and almost as much time sitting in traffic:
Making the B41 substantially faster would require a series of changes:
Mr. Mamdani has voiced support for infrastructure initiatives like this, although the campaign’s estimated cost for the free-fare program doesn’t include the sizable expenses needed to do such projects in tandem. Transit advocates are also pushing the city to go further, leveraging an array of “bus rapid transit” improvements that would also enable riders to enter from all bus doors and to pay for the bus at sidewalk kiosks, while revamping more intersection signals to prioritize buses.
All-door boarding and off-board payment would logistically have the same effect as free fares, cutting the time it takes passengers to board. We asked Ms. Weinstock, who has studied how to implement faster buses in New York, to estimate how much all of these changes together would speed up the B41.
In an ideal world, all these investments could cut about 40 percent off the time of a B41 trip — far more than doing free fares alone. It certainly helps to speed up the process of boarding riders. But that’s not the thing that helps the most. And there are other ways to get those same savings while still collecting fares.
Of course, free fares are about financial savings for riders as much as time savings. But there are some other, less sweeping ways to do that, too.
About 375,000 low-income riders already pay half-cost fares under the Fair Fares program funded by the city. It subsidizes fares on the bus and subway for households making less than 145 percent of the federal poverty level.
But advocates want to push the threshold up to 200 percent — or even 300 percent, where a family of four earning as much as $96,500 a year would qualify.
“We think it would be much less costly than a totally free system,” said David R. Jones, president of the Community Service Society, which has pushed for Fair Fares. He’s also a member of the M.T.A. board.
Mr. Mamdani supports expanding Fair Fares for the subway, alongside free buses. Doing both would further drive up the total cost of his transit agenda.
Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who is polling behind Mr. Mamdani in the mayoral race, has said he would make the subway and buses free for New Yorkers making up to 150 percent of the federal poverty line, or about $48,000 for a family of four.
Free for some, faster for more
The allure of free buses is partly that many of these other interventions are harder. Roads must be ripped up and redesigned. Neighbors will complain. Infrastructure projects take years (the redesign of a roughly one-mile stretch of Flatbush Avenue is scheduled to be done next year). Even scaling up Fair Fares would require the city to do more to reach people who qualify — today only about a third of residents who do are in the program.
But you can declare the bus to be free tomorrow, and it will be free tomorrow. It’s a shortcut to improving an aspect of city life where nearly all other answers are slow and hard.
“It’s a guarantee that your life will be better in a way that you can feel every single day,” said Michelle Wu, the mayor of Boston and someone Mr. Mamdani has often cited.
In Boston, the city pays to offset the fares on three high-ridership bus routes that serve lower-income neighborhoods (ridership is up, travel times about the same). That’s the kind of partial measure Mr. Mamdani could pursue: a larger pilot, a targeted set of routes, perhaps while expanding Fair Fares to aid more riders citywide. Maybe that buys patience for the harder improvements.
His campaign insists that the universality of free fares is the point. It’s what gives working-class riders access to the whole city. It’s what could unlock faster speeds for everyone.
But there’s evidence that New Yorkers might like the spirit of the pitch more than the potential reality of it. A recent New York Times/Siena polling experiment of two groups of likely voters showed 56 percent supported making the buses free, even as 57 percent said the city “should not do this.”
To voters, the value of Mr. Mamdani’s promise may largely be in the signal it sends: that he sees New Yorkers struggling on the bus and wants to make things better with big ideas. And that whether or not he really turns off all the card readers, surely he’ll do something to help your wallet, and to fix the buses.
Brad Lander, the city comptroller and an ally of Mr. Mamdani who also ran for mayor in the primary, suggested “fast and free” has a logic to it that’s not necessarily literal. Yes, you need resources to make the buses faster, he allowed, but you also need political will. And Mr. Mamdani is building it in a way that might not have worked had he promised “fast buses” alone.
“If you had had someone say, ‘Well, what if we make the bus a dollar cheaper than the subway, but also produce 20 interborough bus rapid transit lanes, and do all-door boarding to help everyone!’ — those might have been really good ideas,” Mr. Lander said, poking fun at his own policy-dense campaign.
“But they didn’t sufficiently capture the imagination of New Yorkers.”
How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
Ryan Compton knows a thing or two about gigs. To make it in New York, he has worked as a retail associate inside the Museum of Modern Art’s gift store, a cashier for a downtown taqueria and a paint mixer for Takashi Murakami. He has experienced the paradox of a city both known for its artists and for pricing artists out.
Financial constraints forced Mr. Compton, who is from South Jersey, to move away from New York twice over the course of two decades. He has lived in Baltimore, Chicago and Philadelphia, but remains convinced the resources and people inside New York are unparalleled.
“You never know who you’re going to run into,” he said. “Everyone’s curious about each other.”
Since moving back in 2022, he has whittled down his source of income to a single gig as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he made $51,000 before taxes last year. It’s his second time at the museum. He first worked there part-time in 2011 before leaving in 2015 to earn his master’s degree in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
“I know I couldn’t afford graduate school and the cost of living in New York at the same time,” he said.
A third try at New York life has forced Mr. Compton, now 46, to confront the sustainability behind a career as both an interdisciplinary artist and a security guard — even inside one of the most famous museums in the world.
Love at First Sight (With New York)
As an undergraduate student at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Mr. Compton looked forward to spending weekends at his friend’s apartment gallery in the East Village in Manhattan.
A combination of showing face and knowing the right person led to his side project at the time — fashioning 3-d printed stuffed animals with skull faces — which were featured in an issue of Vogue Japan. He even sold a few inside a handmade craft store in Tokyo’s Ginza district for about $1,000.
“I was interested in the contrast between fuzzy-shaped animals and skulls,” he said, later adding, “You know, stuff when you’re a 20-something-year-old being kind of edgy.”
The early moment of success propelled Mr. Compton to chase after opportunities to showcase his work. While supporting himself financially through retail and service jobs, he helped write the artist Roman Ondak’s interactive performance piece at MoMA, “Measuring the Universe;” and worked as a collaborator for “No Souls for Sale,” an experimental project temporarily at Dia Chelsea and later, the Tate Modern in London. Both went unpaid.
“The chance to work in modern art before I was 30 is unheard of,” Mr. Compton said. “It only happens in New York.”
A Slower Pace
Tens of thousands of people flock to the Metropolitan on weekends, and it’s Mr. Compton’s job — one he has found increasingly difficult — to make sure the art is untouched. He believes social media has altered the way visitors engage with the museum. Think more selfies and poses leaned against Hellenistic marble.
The one hour work commute from Parkchester in the East Bronx gives him time to prepare for a long day ahead. He splits a two-bedroom with a co-worker for $1,000 a month and pays $50 in utilities. Heat and water are included in his rent, and his roommate covers the cost of Wi-Fi. He pays $90 each month for his phone bill.
The slower pace of the residential neighborhood matches the stage of life he’s in now. In the last few years, Mr. Compton has slowed down as he has come to terms with the expenses behind his art.
He no longer has free access to fabrication laboratories pegged to his university, and he has opted for the more cost-friendly hobbies of zine-making and book binding. He is, however, eyeing a $1,000 3-d printer. For now, he has settled on $20 a month Photoshop subscription.
The largest constraint tempering Mr. Compton’s spending is his $100,000 student loan debt from graduate school. The window for his deferment period closed, and even with some money he inherited after his mother passed, he says he needs a miracle to finish paying off his loans. “I’m not sure what to do anymore,” he said.
Splurging on Plants and Experimental Harsh Noise Records
Mr. Compton may not have any children, but he is a proud “plant dad.”
His apartment houses $1,000 worth of plants sourced through Facebook groups, pop-ups and by following Brooklyn Horticulture online. He typically pays $30-$50 for medium to large sized plants, but he is constantly on the lookout for deals.
When he isn’t at home with his plants, Mr. Compton treks into Manhattan to do his weekly grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s. He prefers the prices there to local spots in the Bronx and estimates he spends $70 each week.
A cash guzzler of Mr. Compton’s food budget is the $20 a day — an additional $80 a week — he spends at the Metropolitan’s staff cafeteria for breakfast and lunch. When working 12 hour shifts, “I’m not gonna go home and make something to bring the next day,” he said.
On his days off, he seeks out affordable food deals. He frequents Vanessa’s Dumplings in Chinatown for their $8 dumpling special.
When in the mood to treat himself, Mr. Compton rides the train a few more stops out to Ridgewood, Queens and Bushwick, Brooklyn, to visit his favorite record stores like Fringe Records and Nexus Records. An experimental harsh noise aficionado, he spends no less than $100 each visit.
His biggest and most recent splurge was a 10-day trip to Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka in Japan in February. He was able to cut his $900 round trip ticket to $700 with credit card points. Add in the cost of hotels, meals and souvenirs, he spent close to $5,000 total.
“I wanted to go because my artwork had been to Japan, but I haven’t been to Japan,” he said.
Looking Ahead
Mr. Compton wants to strike a balance between saving and enjoying the life he dreamed of in New York. To help pay off his loans, he considered applying to be an art handler for the Metropolitan, a job with a slight pay bump. But without his present benefit of overtime pay, he’s afraid he would be making less than he does currently.
Over the years, Mr. Compton has found community among other security guards at the Metropolitan, who, like him, are artists. He has also built inroads with notable names at the museum, one being Sheena Wagstaff, the former chairman of modern and contemporary art, who he said took the time to know Mr. Compton not only as a co-worker, but also as an individual, too.
Because of his connections, he feels like he has nowhere else to go. He considered a quieter lifestyle upstate in Westchester or the Catskills, but believes he will make less money outside of the city. And, of course, he would have to leave the place he’s called home for the majority of his adult years.
“I did four other cities, and they weren’t as good or great as I like New York,” he said. “I always end up here.”
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
You made it time. If you want to look a little longer, just scroll back up and press “Continue.”
Look up.
Before you commute home to suburbs like Tarrytown and Larchmont, or race toward the next stop on your tourist map, take a minute.
Look up to see the stars.
One hundred and twenty-five feet above you are 2,500 stars and six signs of the zodiac along the ecliptic, a line that represents the path of the sun across the sky:
The signs are joined by a few others: Orion, Pegasus, Triangulum and, in the center of it all, Musca Borealis (the Northern fly, or sometimes called Apis, the bee). The Milky Way streaks across the ceiling in the opposite direction. The whole thing is ringed by intricate plaster moldings along the clerestory windows. Fifty-nine of the stars twinkle.
Who says there isn’t magic in Midtown?
The original early 1900s plan for the ceiling was to build a massive skylight so commuters could look up at the actual stars:
But time and money were short, so the architects asked the artist Paul Helleu to design a version of the sky on the ceiling instead. Helleu took inspiration from star atlases from the 1600s. His main resource was the Uranometria from 1603, a lushly illustrated volume that was the first detailed cataloging of individual stars, their positions and brightness. See how similar the figures are. This is Aries:
Here’s Taurus, the bull:
A heart balloon — one of several — had floated up the day we took this photograph, nestling between Orion’s club and Taurus’s horn (maybe an earthly sign that this heavenly hunt might finally resolve).
Converting the flat drawings of a spherical sky re-projected onto a semi-cylindrical vaulted ceiling would have been no easy task. The design work was done by a famous scenic designer and muralist, James Monroe Hewlett, and was overseen by the Columbia astronomy professor Harold Jacoby, who in 1910 assured a panicked public that Halley’s comet would not hit Earth.
Dozens of painters got to work. The terminal opened at midnight on Feb. 2, 1913. The New York Central Railroad boasted “that many school children will go to the Grand Central Terminal to study this representation of the heavens.”
Two weeks later, a commuter from New Rochelle (and a hobby astronomer) looked up at the ceiling and realized that west was east and east was west and the sky was not, actually, in a proper arrangement. Only Orion was shown in the “correct” orientation. He wrote a “wrathful” letter to the station. As The New York Times reported in 1913, officials at Grand Central “did not deny the charge that things were a bit mixed, but held that it was a pretty good ceiling for all that.”
How this happened is still a matter of debate, given Professor Jacoby’s astronomical blessing.
Michael Allison, a former NASA planetary scientist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (and a former adjunct in the Columbia astronomy and astrophysics department), met me last month at the great clock under the ceiling to explain his theory.
“I’ve stared at the ceiling I don’t know how many hours,” he said. “I keep hoping I can discover one more thing.”
The liberties taken, Mr. Allison said, like re-sizing the constellations to fit the space and flipping Orion (in relation to the rest), were carefully done. Ultimately, a good marriage of art and science. He thinks Jacoby was a victim of big project bureaucracy, that it was all a mixup.
Jacoby probably expected the design he approved to be projected overhead, where the result would match the plans if you held them above you. The painters put them on the floor instead. Hence, the flip.
But this “heavenly view” — the stars as if they could be seen from above, looking down — may not be a bad view at all.
“There are just so many bad things happening in the world now that I think the sky offers a perspective that can lift us above that,” Mr. Allison said.
For Deirdre Newman, the great-granddaughter of the muralist Hewlett, who painted the ceiling, the imperfection “is what art is.”
Ms. Newman, it turns out, is also a painter of murals and ceilings. But these days, if she has to flip an image, she just hits a button on the projector.
“Anytime I make a mistake painting, I’m like, this proves that it’s art,” she said. “It is not perfection, and it shouldn’t be — it would be a sad thing if it was.”
The stories that we’ve given to the stars over millenniums, some of the most retold tales in history, are hardly orderly — stories of fate, violence, betrayal, revenge, sex and punishment. Cancer helps Hera in pinching a rival’s foot. Orion, son of Poseidon, is placed in the stars by Zeus, locked in an eternal hunt. The two fish of Pisces (Aphrodite and Eros) are linked together to escape the monster-of-all-monsters, Typhon.
Or the stories are totally different if you were Babylonian or Egyptian, Greek or Roman. Today, the stars mean something else again to a devoted user of the horoscope app Co-Star, seeking reassurance after a breakup. And to a commuter standing in Grand Central, looking up while waiting for the train, the stars might just be a momentary diversion, a decorative way to pass the time. Or more.
Take what you want. Take what you need.
***
By the 1940s, the ceiling had fallen into disrepair, so they painted a whole new one on four-foot-by-eight-foot asbestos sheets over the old one. This is the version that exists today. Eventually that second ceiling, too, grew dark with grime and had to be cleaned from 1996 to 1998. The difference was stark. As you were zooming in, you may have noticed a little dark square by Cancer. They deliberately left one bit of the uncleaned ceiling here:
The best time to take all of it in — the ceiling, and the majesty of the station — might just be coming this weekend. The setting sun will line up with Manhattan’s street grid and should (pending clouds) bathe the terminal in a beautiful golden glow Saturday at 8:19 p.m. and Sunday at 8:20 p.m. I plan to be on the east balcony looking west on Sunday for that moment.
See you there.
How we took the photograph
To generate a high-resolution panorama of the ceiling, The Times captured 232 close-up images. We then used software to stitch these photos into an equirectangular projection, to approximate the curve of the ceiling. We also developed custom computer vision software to ensure consistent color blending across varying lighting conditions. To optimize for display efficiency and clarity during navigation, the image was then re-projected into the shape of a cube. We think it’s still a pretty good picture for all that.
This is an installment in our series of experiments on art and attention. If you liked this one, you may like these past exercises: a finished, unfinished portrait; a sudden rain over a bridge; a unicorn tapestry; some buckets from Home Depot; and a Whistler painting.
Sign up to be notified when new installments are published here. And let us know how this exercise made you feel in the comments.
Welcome to Day 2 of the Metropolitan Diary challenge, part of our celebration of the column’s 50th anniversary. On Day 1, we gave you tips for identifying your New York City story. Today, we’ll help you write it. (Missed Day 1? It’s not too late to start.)
What makes for a good Diary? It’s simply a good story that happens to be set in, and capture, the essential New York-ness of the city. While this isn’t a full writing course, we do have guidance on the kinds of elements that the submissions we publish include. They typically have: a beginning, middle and end; sharp details; catchy dialogue; a bit of surprise; some humor, warmth or emotion. But there is no formula, so flouting these loose rules can be worthwhile.
Don’t worry if you don’t think of yourself as a “writer.” Focus on being a “storyteller.” Pretend you are telling your story to the person who’d most appreciate it, using whatever conversational language or pacing that would hold their attention. Do it out loud if you want, maybe give that person a call and tell them your story (or tell it to them again). Then write it down.
That’s the big picture. For more tips, read on.
Here is an example of a published Diary that we (and readers) really liked, and a few thoughts on why that may help crystallize yours.
Unacceptable
Dear Diary:
I went to a new bagel store in Brooklyn Heights1 with my son.
When it was my turn to order, I asked for a cinnamon raisin bagel with whitefish salad and a slice of red onion.2
The man behind the counter looked up at me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t do that.”3
— Richie Powers
One of this item’s best qualities is that it is short and snappy. Only 53 words! Although we will use stories of up to 300 words, many don’t need to be that long and the column doesn’t work if we don’t have a mix of long, medium and short, so we are always looking for stuff like this. Here’s another one!
At Attention
Dear Diary:
It was December 1967. I had just finished basic training at Fort Dix in New Jersey and was traveling to Boston in uniform. For reasons I no longer recall, I stopped in New York City on the way.1
Walking on the Upper East Side2 in a snowstorm, I spied another man in a uniform. He was older, and his cap bore the familiar gold band that identified him as an officer.
I rendered a snappy salute. It was not returned. 3The uniform was unfamiliar, so I guessed he was a foreign officer. Military courtesy still required me to salute.
A little farther down the street, I encountered another officer and offered another salute that went unacknowledged.4 His uniform was strange to me as well.
The third time it happened, the man I saluted ignored me while holding the door for a couple 5on their way into a large apartment building.
I realized I had been saluting doormen.6
— Stephen Salisbury
To get your storytelling muscles going, think through or jot down the answers to some of these questions.
Let’s start with setting the scene.
- When and where in the city did this happen? Is this place well-known?
- Was there anything particular about that point in your life that’s relevant?
- What did you see, hear, smell? Was there something notable about the weather?
Now, let’s move to the middle, the meat of the story.
- Did you have an exchange with someone?
- What details are important to how events unfolded, especially in setting up the ending?
And now, the end.
- What’s the resolution? Is there a punchline?
- Does the story end with a sense of shared humanity or some other warm feeling that lingers? You don’t need to name it. A good description will often allow readers to feel it too.
- Why has this experience stayed with you?
- Lines like “and that’s why I love New York” are almost always unnecessary.
That’s it. Keep your story simple and use the kind of plain language you use in conversation. You are sketching a moment in time. The details are important. Let them move the story along. Have fun and good luck.
Once you’re done, read through what you’ve got. What details are less important and can be left out? (Remember, there is a strict 300-word limit.)
Write your Metropolitan Diary however you like, on paper, on your phone or wherever! When you’re happy with what you’ve written, put your diary entry into the box below, fill out your information and submit it. You might just hear from me about including it in a future column.
This is the official submission form, so make sure to double-check your work before hitting submit.
That’s it! Submit your Metropolitan Diary.
By transmitting your submission, you grant The New York Times Company a perpetual, royalty-free license to use the submission in any medium. They may be edited, and may be republished and adapted in all media. You may reprint your story elsewhere after it appears in The Times.
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