We’ve spent our past two Creative Nonfiction class periods interviewing fellow classmates.
I’ve interviewed a lot of people over the past 25 years. I cut my teeth doing interviews for my college newspaper, before doing intern stints with both the El Reno Light and the El Reno Tribune. Most of those interviews went horrible. Typically I showed up with a set list of questions (that I refused to deviate from), asked them, and left.
The first really good interview I did was for the El Reno Tribune. The city was relocating a historical home, and the newspaper asked me to cover the story. One of the first people I ran into was a woman dressed in historical clothing. She turned out to be from the historical society, and knew all about the house. After talking with her for quite some time, I tailed one of the construction workers and asked a million questions about the process of moving a house. Both people were more than willing to talk to me, and the story turned out great. I wish I still had a copy of it.
In the late 90s, when Susan and I were living in Spokane and working on In-Tune Magazine, we interviewed lots of bands. The best interviews were the ones where I arrived with no agenda in mind. I met Cotton Mouth at a local recording studio the day they received the first rough mix of their album on CD. We hopped into one of the guys’ cars and I spent the next hour with them as they listened to the album for the first time, discussing each track. I interviewed the (then) newest members of L.A. Guns for two hours the day they arrived two hours early for a sound check. I interviewed Life of Agony on their tour bus after they had been dropped from their label and was paying for a cross country tour out of their own pockets.
If you want a terrible interview, start asking your subject things they’ve been asked hundreds or thousands of times before. Asking bands that have been around for decades about how they got started is just asking for the interviewee to check out mentally. If you really want an interesting interview, find out what they want to talk about. I visited a musician’s home one time for an interview. When I arrived, he was working on a painting. I asked a question about his new album, and got almost nothing in return. I asked another question; that one fell flat, too. Finally, I asked him about his painting. We spent the next two hours digging around in his garage, looking at old paintings he had done. It ended up being a way better interview than what I had planned.
I have a few techniques I use when I’m interviewing people. Sometimes, I pretend like they are the most interesting person in the world. I don’t mean that in a sarcastic or demeaning way at all. If you can make people feel important, they will open up to you. Another technique I sometimes use is I mentally pretend like I would like to get a job doing the same thing my interviewee does. Oh, so you own a restaurant? How could I do that? Then of course there are the tried and true things that I mentioned above — do your research before hand, and don’t be afraid to go where your subject wants to go. If Eddie Van Halen wants to talk about cars, talk about cars.
I’ve had a couple of interviews go spectacularly terrible. I’ll write about one of those tomorrow.