The Art of the Interview

Presenter: Dale Keiger

Dale’s been interviewing and writing for 36 years and figures he’s had between 1,800 and 2,000 stories published … so the man’s done a lot of interviews. Here are a few tips on The Art of the Interview from the Dale:

• Contrary to popular advice, an interview is NOT a conversation. “If your interview is a conversation,” he says, “you’re talking to much. Your job is not to talk. It’s to listen.”

• A good interview is NOT a seduction. The definition of seduction is progress toward a preconceived end. You’re not going to learn new or surprising things this way. You want to let the interview take its own direction.

• A good interview gets you the answers to questions you had not thought to ask before you started.

• Listen.

• A request for an explanation does not make the interviewer sound unintelligent or ill-prepared, it reveals a deep curiosity, and in turn, gets the subject to talk more. A lack of preparation—not knowledge—reveals a lack of interest.

• And speaking of preparation … You must prep and research, and it’s a good idea to make a list of questions and follow-up questions. Then, he suggests, you should leave that list in your office. “If you walk [into an interview] with a list of questions,” he says, “you’re scripting the interview. You’ll feel like you need to stay on script if [the interview] moves in a different direction.” Over-preparation can lead to a stale interview. Remember, you can always go back later to ask questions you may have missed or forgotten.

• This may seem counterintuitive, but as an interviewer, you are not after answers. You are after stories. People read stories. “If you are not telling stories,” he says, “you are not being read.” We arrange our lives in stories, so get your subject to tell you theirs.

• There’s a lot of hype about the mystery of establishing a rapport with your subject. Here’s the secret, straight from Dale: “Ask a short question, then shut up and listen.” People cannot resist talking about themselves and their passions. “The problem,” he says, “is not getting them to talk. It’s getting them to shut up.”

A few tips on asking questions:

•     Keep it short.

•     Ask a question only once. Don’t rephrase it and ask it again.

•     Don’t ask a question and then prompt the subject by answering it yourself.

•     Keep your questions open-ended, then shut up and listen.

•     Don’t interrupt.

•     Don’t launch into your own anecdotes.

•     Oh yeah, shut up and listen.

All good interviews include these seven questions:

1. Why?
2. For example?
3.  Says who? (a few less flippant variants might be How do we know? What makes us so sure?)
4. So what? In other words, Why do we (or our readers) need to care about this subject?
5. Could you show me?
6. What did I not ask you, but should have?
7. Who else should I talk to?

A coupla bonus questions:

• Tell me about your most instructive mistake. (People have a tendency to talk only about the good things. Their faults and mistakes bring them to life on the page.)
• Tell me something cool that nobody knows about what you do.
• How would you write your own story. (If their view differs from your view of them, you’re in interesting territory, and you should then try to find out why.)
• Dale’s favorite first question is: What was first? Other variants of that question: How did [fill in the blank here] get started? How did you start working on this? How did you ever get interested in that.

Other tips:

• Listen to how something is said—regional dialect, figures of speech, slang. All of these details bring the reader to life.

• Listen for what is not being said. Find out why the subjects isnb’t talking about it.

• Dale quotes Katherine Boo who once said, “Go for coffee, bring a tent.” In other words be prepared for anything and ride it out.

—Maureen Harmon