Reading

The Art of the Interview

A good interview is often described as a conversation, which is true in the same way that a tightrope walk is “just a stroll”. On the surface, two people talk. Underneath, one of them is balancing: listening, steering, checking facts, watching time, and quietly deciding which thread is worth pulling before it snaps. Most beginners, when they start writing interviews, obsess over questions. They build lists like scaffolding: neat, logical, and completely indifferent to the person sitting opposite them. The trouble is that real people don’t answer in bullet points. They digress, dodge, perform, and occasionally reveal something by accident. Your job isn’t to force them back onto the rails, but to notice when the rails were the wrong route in the first place. Preparation matters, though not in the heroic way people imagine. You don’t research to show off; you research to avoid wasting precious minutes on what can be found in a five-second search. Reading old profiles and watching previous interviews is useful, but only if you’re alert to repetition. Public figures develop “safe stories” the way companies develop slogans: they are polished, portable and, after the tenth retelling, almost entirely free of meaning. If you’ve heard the anecdote already, your reader probably has too. The most productive interviews often begin with something deceptively simple. Instead of launching into a grand theme (“Tell me about your philosophy”), you can ask for specifics: a recent decision, a small failure, the detail they keep returning to. Specificity pins people down without being aggressive. It also creates texture. Readers don’t remember that a novelist is “passionate”; they remember that she rewrote the first chapter thirty times because one sentence sounded like an apology. Of course, not everyone wants to be pinned down. Some interviewees treat every question as an invitation to advertise themselves. Others answer with fog: long replies that contain many nouns and no commitment. In those moments, the temptation is to fill the silence with your own voice, partly out of politeness and partly out of panic. Resist it. Silence is not a failure; it’s a tool. If you stop speaking and simply look interested, people often continue—sometimes into territory they didn’t intend to enter. Then there is the ethical problem that doesn’t feel like an ethical problem at the time: making someone sound better than they were. When you transcribe, you discover that normal speech is messy. People start sentences, abandon them, repeat themselves, and use “like” as punctuation. Cleaning that up is fine; rewriting their meaning is not. The interview should not become ventriloquism. And yet you also have to edit. An interview in print is never the raw encounter; it is a shaped version of it, and you are responsible for the shape. Structure is where interview writing becomes writing rather than stenography. A transcript is chronological; a good interview on the page is architectural. You decide what the opening implies, what the middle deepens, and what the ending leaves hanging. Sometimes the best line comes early and has to be moved, not because you’re cheating, but because you’re building an intelligible experience for a reader who wasn’t in the room. None of this guarantees brilliance. Some interviews fail because the subject is guarded; others fail because the interviewer is too eager to be liked. But the best interviews share a quiet ambition: they try to produce understanding rather than applause. If you leave the reader with a sharper sense of how the interviewee thinks—especially when that thinking is inconvenient, contradictory, or unfinished—you’ve done more than collect quotes. You’ve written something that can outlast the news cycle.

Answer the Questions

For each question, choose the correct answer