The Heavily Edited, It's Also About Me-Style Interview Assignment

We're now going to move on to interviews, where you are just as much a presence--often even moreso--than the person you are interviewing.

Due Dates: 
The Also About Me questions: Due November 3 by 9am via email.


Rough Draft Due: Tuesday, November 10 at 11:59pm
Workshops November 12


"First" Final Draft: Tuesday, November 24, 1pm
Word count: 900-1767 words



Final-Final Draft Workshops on December 8 and 10.
Final-Final Drafts: Due with Final Portfolio. Word count: 900-1300 words, including intro.



Background.
There are several scenarios for this kind of interview:
What if your subject isn't famous or isn't terribly interesting?
What is your subject isn't forthcoming or needs to be prodded into producing an answer?
What if it is noteworthy or interesting who interviewer is?
What if you have something to say to everyone as well as your interviewee?

Specifications. You will interview someone you do not know; in other words, a Complete Stranger.  Please see this post for Clarifying Points on this Complete Stranger Rule, as well as the reasons why specific and not specific to this class.

I divide Heavily Edited, It's Also About Me Interviews into two categories, and will provide an exemplar for each.  There are more categories of this type of Q and A interview, but this is what we will do first.

Confrontational. Deborah Solomon certainly interrupts her subjects and asks hard, probing questions. Another tack is to make a bit of theater out of your interview.

In The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Deborah Solomon writes a "Questions For" interview feature [archive link here]. This column has made headlines recently and is an interesting case study for our class. Solomon, whose interviews are well-known for their brassy, sometimes combative pace and tone, came under scrutiny regarding how the articles are edited and put together.

Specific examples: Darryl Strawberry, Patti Smith, and Cynthia Nixon.

There are issues, journalistic and ethical, that surround this kind of interview. Matt Elzweig of the New York Press wrote an expose last year called "Questioning the Questioner," which was followed by the Times' Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, who addressed what some see as fast-and-loose interviewing ethics on Solomon's part [link]. The Huffington Post also covered the issue. 

One result of all this hoopla and handwringing is that Solomon's interviews now have the byline of "Interview conducted, condensed, and edited by Deborah Solomon." Still, this sort of interview, where questions are re-sequenced and answers chopped down for length and readability, is a staple in magazines and newspapers.

Eccentric. I am a huge fan of the long-running, now-defunct Toni Schlesinger's "Shelter" column, which ran in the Village Voice for almost 10 years. These were recently compiled in a book called Five Flights Up: New York Apartment Stories, right.

New Yorkers are obsessed with real estate and apartments, and the angle of Schlesinger's feature was to ask people about their apartments, the story of their apartments, and basically just to talk to them (sometimes at them). A link to an interview with Schlesinger appears here; direct links to some Shelter interviews online are here, here, here, here, and here.

Interviewing is an art and a craft. Interviewing, first and foremost, means listening—a large task, to be sure. It also means that the interviewer “believes” in what is being told—which usually means avoiding becoming an advocate for what someone is telling. This means, in part, that interviewers may sometimes listen to things they may disagree with, or agree with, are confused by, or are even repulsed at hearing. More often than not, the interviewer needs to keep things closer to their chest than, say, an Entertainment Tonight interviewer may do.

From On The Media: John Solomon's segment "Pulling Back the Curtain," which examines editing interviews for the radio.

Do you want to include an introduction or head note?  Here are some tips:

Specific to your own drafts: 

The intro should be no longer than 150 words. 
You will have to cut out that much from the interview draft to stay within your overall word count.
Revise your questions to avoid any redundancies mentioned in your intro. 


Generally speaking: 

Use that intro well--describe what you did not get to describe about your subject. 
Be juicy. Give us a taste of what we are about to read--the most exciting or controversial points.
Explain your subject's past, his/her appearance, voice, mannerisms.
Is there a relevance, current event, or issue, or some sort of timeliness you can mention that would pique readers' interest?
Place us in the interview: tell us where you are doing this interview, what expectations you had of this person before meeting, and whether those expectations were true or up-ended.

Time Out New York's Hot Seat interviews are a good model to go by. Check out the introductions that accompany interviews with Pink, Keira Knightley, and Jason Segal.