Interviewing

[aggienaut]

   So I recently interviewed my (third?) person for writing an article about them, this local elderly fellow who is very artistic and soon will be moving out of our little town, so the community paper wanted me to do an article about him. I walked the few hundred meters across the village to meet him at his lovely little cottage, we sat in his kitchen, we made our preliminary introductions, I asked if I could record and then started the voice recorder.
   "Okay let's start at the beginning, where and when were you born?"
   He answered this without elaboration, as he opened a scrap book, and began telling me about various recent art projects as he turned pages revealing photos of them. Knowing this would be useful I paid attention and asked a few pertinent questions but tried to redirect him back to his life story. Unfortunately he wasn't terribly helpful in this respect ("Do you remember your first artistic project?" "hmm no" "Were you artistic when you were a child?" "probably?"). The details I was able to get together about his life gradually came out in no sort of chronological order, told in a sometimes unintentionally misleading order ("so wait was that the house you lost in bankruptcy or the one you got in exchange for making an award winning garden? Oh it was neither it was, wait when what?").
   This got me thinking about a youtube video I had recently seen about the hidden rules of conversation. I find when I interview people they want to tell me "the story" in the way they think it would or should be put down on paper (in fact the first two people had begun telling me their story as if they were directly following the outline of and paraphrasing articles about them I'd already read, I don't know if that's because the previous writer took it down exactly as told to them or the subject person themself adopted that as "the" story about them), but the way it should be put down in paper IMO should more or less follow those same "hidden rules of conversation" (basically that one thought logically follows another, is relevant to the overall topic, and is neither too much nor too little information). In the case of this most recent interview, I think my interviewee had his own idea of what the story is about (his recent art projects), but wasn't quite appreciative of the fact that if I just started in about these projects without a larger context about them, the reader would struggle to find their relevance.
   Not that I'm just here to say oh this guy was a bad interviewee, and really I should have thoroughly engaged him on the art and been patient to come back to the other points I wanted to get at (as it was, by the time I circled back to the art projects he'd kind of lost steam on them); but moreover my point here is this realization that I think a lot of non-writers struggle even when they have a story because they don't realize that the rules they easily assume in conversation also apply to writing.

Comments

[lookfar.livejournal.com]

I think you would really like Janet Malcolm's popular book on psychoanalysis — I read it a long time ago and I remember her writing that she thought she has this amazing technique for getting people to open up etc etc, then when a guy gave her his notes for a book he'd never gotten around to writing, she saw that he got all the same info she did and his technique was awful. Conclusion: people are driven to tell their stories and they'll tell if they want.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Related, I've also been thinking that a lot of what makes good writing isn't so much the poetic construction of turns of phrases so much as really good information organization.

[livejournal.livejournal.com]

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[wpadmirer.livejournal.com]

Interviewing is an art form itself. If you can get someone in a conversation, they're more likely to lead you to something interesting.

[lookfar.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, that thing where it goes down so smooth, you aren't struggling to understand at all.

[millysdaughter.livejournal.com]

I tried to end every interview with some variation of the question, "What was it that I really need to know for this article but I did not think to ask?"

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah thinking about it, he thought the art was most important because he may have been lead to believe thats what I was writing an article about, and he had no conception of puttin the art in context so he was tryyying to help me while inadvertently short circuiting my quest for context, but it probably all might have gone more smoothly if I had begun with a thorough explanation of what I hoped to write about

[wpadmirer.livejournal.com]

It's all a learning experience, and you never know the trick with each individual.

[jessmonty718.livejournal.com]

that must have been frustrating. this should have been a topic the interview-ee should have wanted to engage in.. but the pulling teeth factor would have driven me nuts.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Thats a good idea! (:

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah I mean he was very excited when he finally read the final result but the problem with the interview stage was that he was set in his idea of what it was about and the narrative. I remember he also kept going on about how much each of his houses had sold for, which, I think mainly because as houses have done over this period, they had increased severalfold in value during the time he lived in them but to me it was kind of a boring irrelevant topic that didn't make it into my article at all.