The Art of the Interview

When I was a young reporter, I was once sent to a “sensational” story – hundreds of steelworkers had just been laid off at U.S. Steel, and this was a national shock.   I had to race from our NPR bureau in downtown Chicago and get the story on the air within hours.  There was one huge problem:  at 27, I didn’t think any of these steelworkers would talk to me.  I was a kid, and they had just gotten the worst shock of their lives. Who, I thought, would want to spill their guts to Jacki Lyden?

And radio reporters, just like novelists and memoirists and nonfiction writers, need real speech to  relate. One of my colleagues (Susan Stamberg)  once said, “You have to catch people in the act of thinking,” and sometimes, you have to make them think. 

So how do you do that?

I remember that  I thought,  “Maybe they won’t want to talk to me, but anyone would want  talk to “Zelda Thorne."  And I became her. Zelda was named for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, who ended her days in an institution for the mentally ill, but who burned brightly on literary stage  for a long time before that.   And Thorne, well.. I would pierce their armor, I thought.

And it worked.  I don’t know if I looked different, was more patient, felt taller, who knows.  She was me but she wasn’t me, and the best part was that that she was patient with people and confident and wanted you to know she’d tell your story well.

I know that people talk about giving themselves permission to tell their own stories… but often, that is only step one.  You still have to craft the who, the what the why – especially the why.   You still have to leave them wanting more.  You still have to dance with the interviewee.   I coach my workshop writers to interrogate their own characters for motive, and I teach them how to listen.  I don’t block people or jump on them unless I’m doing a live interview and they’re trying to evade me.  Most of the time, in journalism and in life, especially in sensitive matters and troubled times,  we need to be better at listening  and then, start talking

After that .. you can go in for the kill. Find a connection. Work it through. Think.