And then what happened?
If you want to capture the heart of the human experience, level up your interviewing skills. Here's how.
Hi storytellers –
I used to believe that the most wondrous thing about life as a journalist is access — the license to go places and meet people that “civilians” don’t typically get.
But I was wrong.
What’s truly wondrous are the revelatory moments that come from this access: the hushed walk down a darkened hall toward the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), a nurse explaining how dangerous light and noise are for fragile infants, some the size of my hand.
Photo by Aditya Romansa on Unsplash
Sitting with a young mother at a playground picnic table, her nine-year-old son playing nearby, as she tells me how hard it is to get a job after serving prison time — how she isn’t sure she can resist the temptation to return to dealing drugs in a town where few legitimate economic options exist.
The joy of perching on the cockswain’s seat on a dragon boat, recording an elite racing crew as they train for the right to compete for a world championship.
The mother who proudly shows me shelf after shelf of the athletic trophies her son received before he suffered a traumatic brain injury, changing both of their lives forever.
Some beautiful moments. Some heartbreaking. But all awe-inducing, because with every one I received one of the greatest gifts one human being can offer another: the truth of the human condition as they experience it.
In every case, I learned something I could never have understood any other way.
I spent the day yesterday studying fiction writing at a “1-Day MFA” program run by the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, the region’s largest association of fiction writers. Instructor Angie Hodapp of the Nelson Literary Agency reads tens of thousands of sample manuscripts every year. What’s missing from most, Hodapp says, is “Writers forget to include interiority — getting inside a character’s head. If all you want to do is show, not tell, write scripts, not novels.”
“But I don’t write fiction!” I hear you protest. No matter. The lesson still applies.
The best storytelling, whether in an interview podcast, a limited series, a speech or an article, shares those moments of honest human experience, of the kind of interiority that answers, “What does she value? What was that like? What was he thinking? What was she feeling?”
Sadly, nonfiction writers and podcasters don’t often learn how to interview for story. (For a gem of a lesson on this, listen to a talk Ira Glass gave to radio reporters in 2001, resurrected by Rob Rosenthal on a recent episode of Sound School. Thanks, Rob.)
Depending on the reticence or openness of your source, it’s not that hard.
Consider the episode “Losing Everything at Indian Boarding School: Bessie Smith (Dzabahe),” on the Complexified podcast, which my company co-produces with host Amanda Henderson. In this interview, Bessie Smith, whose given Navajo name was Dzabahe, recounts her memories of arriving at an Indian boarding school. She was 13.
It’s classic story structure. We are about to take this journey with her. First we learn some context about why this event is happening. Crucially, we also learn something about who she is and what she values — which will hit hard later, because we will then grasp the depth of what she loses.
Then, her story slows down; time expands. Step by step, we feel we are walking slowly with her up to the school. We see the long lines of students waiting for lunch at the same moment she sees them. We feel the dread building as she puzzles: “Why do they all look alike?” Then, cinematically, we travel with her as she is taken from one room to another, forced to have her hair cut and her clothes stripped. We learn that she cannot keep even her name.
And then she reflects on the totality of what she lost that day.
Beginning, middle and end, all in a simple interview.
When I listen to this story, I understand in 3D what I cannot comprehend from general statements about groups losing their heritage and their culture. I incorporate this understanding, this empathy and compassion, into my being in a way that little else can achieve.
Complexified won the International Women’s Podcast runner-up award in “Moment of Raw Emotion,” for this episode last week. Congratulations to all of those who were shortlisted, who received runner-up awards, and who won.
How can you conduct an interview to get this kind of story? And how can you use the audio editing process to make the end result sing?
That’s our Try This in Your Studio this week.
Brand new workshop! Advanced Interviewing: Finding the Real Story
The best way to hone new interviewing skills is hands-on, in community. In this new virtual, live course, we’ll learn how to interview with our hearts as well as our heads. We’ll learn and practice interviewing for the elements of story: narrative, character, conflict, action, stakes, emotion and meaning.
Four 90-minute sessions, July 16-August 6, $299, by application only
Discounts available for prior workshop participants.
Some scholarships available by request.
Try This in Your Studio
Interviewing for story, emotion and dialogue
Start this as an exercise, rather than beginning with an interview that you must complete on deadline.
Choose an interview subject who you believe has some kind of a story to tell. It does not have to be big.
Most good stories occur at a moment of change. These changes fall broadly into three categories:
A. Something happened to your source, as it did to Bessie Smith when she was taken to boarding school.
B. Your subject did something: They went back to school, left their spouse, climbed a mountain, wrote a book, started a business.
C. Your source realized something important — a significant interior transformation that will set action in motion or that resulted from prior events.
The true constant in all three of these, or course, is that a moment of realization occurs in all three conditions. You’re just beginning at a different starting line.
Now let’s say you have a general idea of what you want to know: Here’s a woman who was sent to an Indian boarding school as a child, like hundreds of thousands of other Native American kids. In general, you want to learn what that experience was like and how it affected her.
Many people begin with broad questions: “Tell me about going to boarding school.” Or possibly, “What was an average day like?”
That’s OK. Some natural storytellers will automatically launch into a story of a particular day. You’ve gotten lucky if that happens.
But many sources generalize in return, because memory is fuzzy without prompts, and because they don’t really know what you’re looking for.
Look for the beginning of the change. Instead, try asking:
“Take me to the moment (or day) when this change first occurred. Where were you? What were you doing? Who were you with? What are you seeing?”
You can even shift into present tense to help them return to that moment in their own heads and hearts. In brain-speak, this is called “narrative transportation.”
Then help them spin out the story, one step at a time. In Ira Glass’s words, ask, “And then what happened? And then what? And then what?”
Don’t forget to ask for dialogue. “What did you say? Then what did he say? And then what?”
In this fashion, you should be able to pull out a complete anecdote, with beginning, middle, and end.
But the end isn’t truly the end: Now we need to know in what way this experience left its mark. You can ask a variety of questions to elicit reflections, such as:
“How did that feel at the time? Looking back on that experience, how does it feel now?”
“How did that change you in a way that you didn’t expect?”
“How did that change how you see (yourself, the world, that person, that issue, your relationship, etc.?”)
“What do you wish you had done/had happened instead?”
“What would have happened if X had not? What was at stake?” (This is a useful question when talking about business, to get leaders out of the widespread habit of only sharing their successes, without explaining how rocky it likely was along the way.)
And, of course, if you want or need more: “What happened next?”
Keep in mind that humans digress. Often when we tell stories, we mix up pronouns. We leave out context that we know well but that a stranger would not. When Amanda didn’t understand an answer, she asked Bessie to repeat, rephrase, or clarify.
The story listeners now hear has been edited a few times for clarity and emotional resonance. It’s completely honest; we’ve just deleted repetition, digression, and extra questions. (This is why straight interviews aren’t as easy to produce as they sound like. When a straight interview is easy on your ears, a lot of work has gone into it.)
Try this in your studio. Send me a link to the result and tell me how it went! I’d love to use it as an example in a future newsletter. Just hit reply to this issue.
In every other issue, we give Sound Judgment Kudos to audio folks, writers and educators we feel are making sound judgments choices that improve our craft or serve others.
Our first SJ Kudo goes to Krista Tippett and the On Being team for this interview with writer Luis Alberto Urrea, “On Our Belonging to Each Other.” This is a conversation for our fractured times. I was captivated, inspired, and uplifted. Here’s a tiny taste of how Urrea thinks: “And I’ve always kept that as one of my prime writing rules… If we could talk to each other without agendas — I’m not trying to convert anybody, I’m just telling you how I feel — I think people will listen.”
Our second and third kudos go to two people who are trying to solve the insanely difficult problem of podcast discovery, especially for indie podcasters. #2 goes to Alice Florence Orr, who has been writing the Podcast Review newsletter for five years, trying to surface superb podcasts that don’t necessarily have the clout and marketing dollars of the tiny number of corporate-run podcasts that dominate the charts and take up the air in the room. Subscribe today.
Our third SJ Kudo goes to Hark Audio host Jody Avirgan and the Hark team. I’ve finally started listening to Hark, a daily compilation of excerpts from many different shows, with introduction and some interpretation from Avirgan. In true marketing genius, Hark’s tagline is “A lifeboat on the open sea of millions of podcasts.”
I highly recommend it if, like me, you’re suddenly at a loss for which new-to-you shows to listen to or need to be reminded of some old favorites. I was delighted by an excerpt about the birth of “cronuts” (a cross between croissants and donuts) from How I Built This. I’m also curious to listen to a story about baseball legend Willie Mays from the San Francisco Chronicle podcast Fifth and Mission. Granted, Hark doesn’t appear to be heavy on indie podcasts, but I haven’t done a thorough investigation of its back catalog. If I’m right, Jody, what are you doing about this?
My own Sound Judgment
I’m getting increasingly interested in the world of local nonprofit news. At AIR (the Association of Independents in Radio, where I’m a board member) we’re hoping to help get more indie producers involved in the effort to grow high-quality local news, which is vital to our democracy. I’d love to hear from you if you’re involved in local nonprofit news, either at the local level or working in associations, collaborations, foundations or philanthropic institutions, including venture funds.
As always, it is a joy to be with you.
Elaine
Epilogue
“Only connect.”
— E.M. Forster