Gerard's Research for Writers
Across an imposing desk, the young manager shouted repeatedly into the telephone-- his face flushed with anger or frustration at whoever was on the other end of the line-- or maybe just at the telephone system itself, which alternately worked perfectly or not at all. I couldn't tell, since I could not speak the language beyond a few pleasantries and proper names.
My interpreter, a dignified old gentleman who, during World War II, had survived both Nazi labor camps and Soviet gulags, as well as relentless combat in a Free Polish brigade on the Eastern Front, was nervous, rubbing his big hands together and glancing about this way and that, as if looking for a way out. Like most of us, the one thing that really unnerved him was genuine rudeness.
The manager kept shouting belligerently into the phone.
Against the interior wall stood a glass display case full of samples of raw flax and finished linen goods-- some of the finest in the world. Behind the manager, the wall was covered with a poster of a nude woman, her pendulous bare breasts looming just over the man's bobbing head-- a glaring trophy of the new, decadent capitalism.
Every time my interpreter would ask him a question, the phone would ring, and he'd spend several minutes shouting into it. This had been going on for at least half an hour. Then a severe young woman entered, some kind of public relations assistant. Her status never did become clear, but she immediately launched into a shrill tirade at my interpreter, and before long the two of them were shouting back and forth at each other, gesticulating wildly, the director was still shouting into the phone, and I was trying not to stare at the leering pin-up poster, tune out the two shouting matches in Polish, and figure out what to do next.
The interview was not going well.
That's the first lesson about interviewing: it's a human encounter, and however carefully you plan it, the event will take on a life of its own. You and your subject may hit it off wonderfully, or the conversation may take on an immediate edge. You may find your rhythm, or you may not. Factors you have no control over may interfere. Don't get thrown. Roll with the situation.
The free-for-all continued for a few more minutes, then all at once we were asked to leave. No, we would not be allowed to tour the factory or interview workers. No, we would not be permitted to take photographs, and we would please not use the manager's name. As he gave us the bum's rush, he did pause in the doorway long enough to harangue his workers for their laziness and bad attitude. "The saying is that the state factory is the factory that belongs to nobody," he complained. "A man owns a hammer, and it serves him for twenty years. In a factory such as this, it lasts three days or less."
On the way to the car, my interpreter filled in some blanks, since he had understood much of what had been said on the telephone. The factory was losing money. The manager was disgusted with his workers, and my guess is they were equally disgusted with him.
I came away with some brief quotes. But more important, I had experienced the poisoned atmosphere of a company that had no clue about how to operate in a suddenly free market. In that sense, the interview had been a success. By living in the moment and being forced to discard my agenda-- a list of questions about wages, costs, flax and linen products-- I had found the real story: all over Poland, all across the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe, factory managers were suddenly accountable for production, for quality, for making a profit; but for two generations their employees had been trained according to the old communist joke: We pretend to work, and you pretend to pay us.
They could not be instilled with ambition and pride in their work overnight, especially when mass- layoffs were sending thousands into unemployment lines every day. Everybody expected to be fired. The new order was fraught with danger.
Before I was through, I would interview dozens of workers, union organizers, managers, and unemployed young men and women, and in their voices would emerge the human story behind the abstractions of "revolution," capitalism," and "free market economy"-- all couched in a blood suspicion of Germans and Russians. "The Germans are bosses-- they like to give orders," my interpreter explained. "The Russians are brutal. The Poles are somewhere in between."
That's what an interview adds to a true story: real voices of real people. Just as in fiction, these people become "characters," and what they say gives texture beyond the writer's style, deepens the meanings of the story. Their words make it true.
Any story is always about people.
Even when the story seems to be about an issue or an idea or a phenomenon, somewhere at the center of the action are people. People talk. An interview is just a conversation between a writer and somebody who knows something the writer doesn't, and, filtered and edited, it comes out as a kind of dialogue-- a narrative device that personalizes a story, that lends immediacy and authenticity to bare facts, that brings those people to life on the page and invites the reader to share their experiences.
Quoted lines illuminate personality and character, establish the subtleties of character, move the piece along, add credibility to other claims in the piece, establish tone (including irony or humor), convey information, provide variety in point of view (often contradicting the governing POV of the author), even provide tension between subject and interviewer.
And even when the spoken words of the subject do not appear in the piece, the interview yields facts, impressions, leads, insights, truth.
Very often the interview functions as a tutorial for the writer-- who needs to find out information -- and the subject, or informant. Such an interview is simply a shorthand way for the writer to get on top of complex information that would take years of law school or graduate work in astro-physics to learn. The subject's exact words may never appear in the piece.
But you might be surprised to learn just how many "introspective" pieces take on spin from other voices. Annie Dillard's work, for example, is full of other voices, quietly adding an opinion or a fact or a way of saying something at exactly the right moment-- the moment when the reader needs a counterpoint to the author's tone. You hardly notice them-- they slip in and out of her prose like highlights in a painting, adding depth here, a touch of shadow there, humor, emphasis and color.
One of the instincts that drives the writer who is fascinated with a topic is to find out what other interesting people have to say about it. Even when we're not actively writing about something, most writers I know are conversation junkies, always asking questions of people who just might know something we don't, eavesdropping on conversations that intrigue us. We like hanging out with people, enjoy arguments and speculation, the sound of voices talking for its own sake. So it may seem a short step between that and a deliberate interview. But in fact most writers I know are just as timid around strangers as the average non-writer-- some even more so.
After all, we writers are used to spending long stretches of solitary time in small, isolated rooms, with only the company of our keyboartds. We hate to bother people. If the person in question is famous, we feel a bit like impostors and are reluctant, even apologetic, about taking up that person's valuable time. You would think that practice would make it easier to approach complete strangers and ask questions, but in my experience, at least, it never gets easier.
So you wind up sitting by the telephone, pencil tapping, going over the questions you want to ask, checking your tape recorder again and again to make sure it's working, then taking a deep breath and mashing the numbers, part of you stupidly hoping that the person you're calling will be out.
Or else standing outside a closed door (the most intimidating thing in the world is a closed door) and taking that same deep breath.
But it's just human nature to be anxious about a first meeting with a stranger. Once past the awkward introductions, you stop being strangers, and as the interview goes on you're feeling more and more comfortable with each other, and the questions and answers become just conversation.
Even when you are about to interview someone you already know, the artificial nature of the planned interview can put you both under a certain tension that would be unthinkable during an ordinary, spontaneous encounter.
For instance, I first met Ron Powers years ago and have seen him half a dozen times since then at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. But when we sat down to do a "formal" interview for this book on subjects we had discussed informally in workshops and dinner conversations, suddenly I felt very nervous. The place we had decided to meet turned noisy and we left, seeking a quieter venue. And as we sat down on a secluded porch to talk, I realized I had left behind my notebook and pen. My microcassette tape recorder turned cranky and wouldn't record, despite the fact that I religiously change batteries before I start any long interview. Powers lent me paper and pen, gave me a patient few minutes to fix the glitch in my recorder, and we both had a laugh and relaxed. Then he said wonderful things about writing.
Any initial awkwardness is not a disaster but simply a matter of course, a moment to get past as gracefully as you can. And if you feel nervous-- and you've done this before-- imagine how your subject may feel.
There is no such thing.
The whole premise of interviewing is that people come in an amazing variety. Just when you think you've heard it all, you'll hear something astounding.
But as writers we live by our habits, and like many writers I try to follow a template for interviewing. Naturally, it varies a lot based on the situation and the person, and other writers do it differently, but it's a useful starting point for a formal, set interview.
To prepare for the interview:
1) Ask yourself why you want to interview this person. This is the question to ask before you ask any others. Is it to get background information? Is this person a main character-- maybe the only character-- in my piece? Or am I interviewing him or her in reaction to another interview? Am I interviewing this person as a way of getting a chance to interview the person I really want to talk to? Until you know why you're talking to somebody, you don't know what you want to take away from the interview. Which means you don't know what to bring into the interview, or what questions to ask during the interview.
2) Establish basic background facts-- a resumé that includes vital statistics such as age and nationality, education, occupation and job title; key credentials, achievements, and honors (and dishonors-- if the guy is a convicted murderer, I want to know that, too). Bear in mind that the object of the interview may be to elicit such a resumé, especially in the case of a non-celebrity, so don't take the above too literally. Sometimes it's as simple as reading the author's bio on the back flap of a book jacket. But if there's background I can reasonably find out before I sit down face to face, I want to make the effort to learn it. I want to have some precise sense of whom I'm talking to-- that will partly determine what questions I ask him.
How much should you know about a person before you sit down and ask her questions? That depends. If the person is a celebrity-- Colin Powell or a Nobel laureate-- it pays to do your homework beforehand: you don't want to waste precious time, theirs or yours, on basic background you can find out from Who's Who or Time magazine. Partly it's a question of how much time you can spend with him, or why you want to talk to her in the first place.
Shooting a public television documentary in Hong Kong, I was asked to write interview questions for Sir Jack Cater-- who wasn't one of my sources. All I knew about him was that he was on the board of a nuclear investment company in China. Why in the world would we want to talk to him for a show about the reversion of a British colony to Chinese rule? The producer said he'd been told this fellow was someone we should talk to, but he didn't know anything about him, either. So I wrote up some boring questions about investment and atomic energy, figuring the interview would be a throwaway.
Chatting with our narrator while the camera and lights were being set up, Sir Jack mentioned offhandedly that he had been in Hong Kong since the end of World War II. It turned out he had helped rebuild the colony after its devastation by the Japanese, and that he had gone on to become the founding anti-corruption commissioner in the civil service. Both foreign occupation and communist corruption were important themes of the show. So we asked him about the war and about anti-corruption, and he gave us a fascinating and emotionally charged interview, full of living memory and anecdote, not facts and statistics but vivid stories about a place and a people he loved-- and his wrenching sense of loss as a lively democracy built on hope and individual achievement came under the blunt hammer of Chinese rule. At the end of his interview, he was close to tears, and so were we.
Most interview subjects are flattered when you obviously know their work and accomplishments-- it's a measure of your seriousness as a writer and also of how seriously you take them. Showing that you have done your homework sets a baseline for the interview-- the subject does not feel compelled to explain basic background and may feel freer to move on to more interesting matters.
3) Decide where you want to conduct the interview-- you may or may not have control over this, but it's a factor. For Secret Soldiers, I very much wanted to interview Bill Blass, who had been a member of the clandestine unit. His assistant responded to my query by saying that Mr. Blass would love to talk to me-- would I prefer meeting in New York or at his home in Connecticut? Connecticut, of course-- I figured there would be fewer distractions, fewer people likely to interfere, and he would be surrounded by the wonderful art and antiques he had collected over a lifetime. His house turned out to be an old coach inn where George Washington used to hold councils of war with his generals. We spent the better part of a day in leisurely talk, even walked the property together, and he invited me back for a return visit.
4) Decide how best to record the interview-- using notebook, tape recorder, or only a good memory. This is not a trivial matter, and what you decide will vary depending on all the variables in the interview.
5) Write a very brief list of the questions you really want to ask. And I mean brief. I usually go into an interview with three to five absolutely essential questions that I intend to ask no matter what. Sometimes, I have only one question. This does not always mean I ask them all -- or ask any of them. But having the list gives me a starting point that reinforces the connection between this interview and the larger piece, and keeping it brief allows me to invent other questions on the spot in reaction to something that's been said in the interview. To follow up. Or to repeat the question, if the subject thinks he's answered it but I don't. It means, even if time runs out, I usually get answers to the most important questions on my mind.
6) Review your notes on other interviews, on your research in general-- so you can cross-reference, inform your conversation, elicit responses to what others have said about the same set of facts, set the stage for a kind of dialogue among your sources.
7) Read what's already been written about your subject, and what he or she has already said in print. This is not always necessary or possible, but especially with celebrities it can help you avoid triteness. It can also give you qualified (because they may or may not have been quoted accurately, or may have changed their mind since) access to their opinions and attitudes. Bill Blass had written a brief piece on "style" in which he named several surprising style heroes- among them Ernest Hemingway.
It's an enlightening-- and unsettling-- experience for a writer to be interviewed. Try it yourself. We are so accustomed to questioning others and then implicitly asking them to trust what we do with their words, that we are too often surprisingly ignorant of how it feels to see your own words go in there and come out here. Persuade somebody to interview you and write their version of it-- then see how well it jibes with your recollection of the interview. Even when I've seen myself interviewed on television, I am always convinced that I didn't really say all those things-- surely I'm smarter, more poised, more articulate than that.
If you can't find anybody willing to interview you, interview yourself with a list of questions using a tape recorder. The playback will be an eerie reminder of the degree of trust your subjects are placing in you the interviewer, and of their vulnerability, of the power you have over their words.
To conduct the actual interview:
1) Begin the interview with an open mind-- prepared to listen. You are not the star of the interview-- your subject is. Out of nervousness, or ego, or maybe just because we like the person we're interviewing and feel drawn to confide in him or her, we can inadvertently dominate the conversation. But when you're talking, you're not listening, and when you're not listening, you're not learning anything you don't already know.
2) Ease into the interview. Break the ice. Chat. Warm up. You may both be nervous, especially if you're using a tape recorder. Again, if you're interviewing on the fly, these niceties may be moot. William Howarth says he once interviewed a subject while clinging to the back of a speeding motorcycle-- hardly the moment for small talk. And some interviewers deliberately open with a tough question, just to catch the subject in a candid moment-- not my style. I prefer to begin with questions that help set the subject at ease, then get more and more pointed as I establish trust. I want the subject to forget I'm an interviewer and just talk to me from the heart. Bill Blass and I discussed style for fifteen minutes of so before we ever got around to war memories, but by then we were already feeling like old friends.
3) Be prepared for the interview to generate some heat. You don't want your subject to stalk out in a fury thirty seconds into the conversation, but allow some latitude for emotions. Let him be angry. Let her express her feelings about her critics. One or both of you may end up in tears. But part of you must always be standing back from the process, emotionally disengaged, keeping track of the encounter.
4) Pay attention to what your subject is saying . Gratuitous advice, right? You'd be surprised how your mind can wander. You thought it would be terrific to interview the pope, but now all you can think of is your next question, how bright the glare is from that window, and look at the funky costume on that guard standing next to him. And what in the world is the right name for that big hat he's wearing? Keep your eye on the ball. Listen. Even if it means you stop writing for a minute. For the duration of the interview, your job is to make your subject think he or she is the most fascinating person in the world-- don't insult him by acting bored or distracted.
5) Pay attention to the physical surroundings, the tone of the conversation, and other cues. The glare from the window and the funky costume of the Swiss guard may wind up in your story. What are you picking up between the lines? What isn't the subject saying? And why won't she look you in the eye? There's a lot going on in an interview-- it's a complex, dynamic event, a warm encounter between thinking hominids, and anything may happen. Paying attention to the context while listening is an acquired skill-- practice it.
6) If you missed something the subject said, if he spoke too fast for you to write it down, if you're not sure you heard what you think you heard, ask him to say it again. Slowly, so you can write it down accurately. Most people I've interviewed are pleased to see you making an overt attempt to get their words right on paper. But be careful not to turn it into a dictation session.
7) After you've asked all your questions, ask her what she would like to say that you haven't asked. Such open-ended comments can turn out to be the heart of the interview-- you thought it was winding up, but it's just starting. Now you know what questions to ask. Remember that you may listen for a long time before the subject says anything worth quoting.
The interview will either come to an end arbitrarily-- the appointments secretary will arrive on cue and show you the door-- or one of you will decide to end it. She is talked out. You can't think of any more questions to ask. There's an awkward pause. You're losing interest. The subject keeps looking at her watch. Maybe it just feels over.
That doesn't mean it is over: it may be only the first of several encounters. Or you may want to follow up with a telephone call after you've had time to review your notes-- either to check a quote for accuracy or to ask that last question that never occurred to you until you were halfway home.
So: 8) Before you leave, make sure you know how to reach your subject for a follow-up interview. Get phone number, address, and e-mail contact information, and file it in at least two places where you can retrieve it readily.
A good way to learn what not to do in an interview is to watch local TV news reporters at work. Again and again, you'll hear startling admissions, tantalizing hints, clues about important directions in which to take the interview-- and the TV reporter, following a list of set questions, will merely move on to the next question:
REPORTER: So, what brought you to Milwaukee?
SUBJECT: Well, after we kidnapped the Lindbergh baby, things got a little hot for us in New Jersey.
REPORTER: And how do you like living here?
Because he or she is simply not listening.
"A good interviewer has an interesting mixture of qualities. A good interviewer is absolutely relentless," Bob Reiss explains. "You're absolutely relentless in driving toward your goal. At the same exact time, you're prepared at any second to abandon your goal-- because what happens if you find out you're going in the wrong direction?"
The key to any interview is to listen.
Good questions open up the field of discussion, give the subject range to tell you what he or she knows. Those local TV reporters always interview children the same way-- by asking "yes" or "no" questions." Unless you're trying to pin down a politician or a crook, a question that can be answered with one word is probably not a very interesting question. And questions do not always have to be phrased as interrogatives. Mild, leading statements can elicit "answers," and the interview can flow as a relaxed, enjoyable conversation.
So what makes a good question?
While preparing for the interview, think of all the obvious questions everybody else would ask, then ask something different, unexpected, something for which the subject has no canned answer. Some characteristics of a good interview question:
Very often, no matter which question you ask, a subject will stubbornly get around to telling you what he wants you to know-- or what he thinks you want to know. Your job is to hear that, but also to coax him beyond what he is prepared to tell you. Often it's not a matter of willful antagonism. It's just that the inexperienced subject will assume you are interested in the obvious, when in fact you are fascinated by the things which are so much a par6t of the person's life that, to him or her, they seem hardly worth remarking.
What constiututes an interview? An informal chat over a drink. A technical blackboard briefing with a nuclear engineer. An adversarial question-and-answer session in a senator's office. You could argue that remembered conversations constitute a kind of interview.-- and realize, too, that very often we write about things we never intended to write about, drawing on everything we know, including remarks people made in our presence that we never planned to use in a piece.
Anthropologists, folklorists, and social historians long ago perfected the non-directed interview-- really a series of monologues by "informants"--which doesn't carry the connotation of "snitch" in this context, but means rather someone who is willing to talk on the record about his or her culture. Usually such interviews are tape-recorded or stenographed in the same manner as testimony at a court trial. In a very real sense, they are testimony. And like courtroom transcripts, they can run to hundreds, even thousands, of pages-- and the challenge is to find the coherent story in the mass of information. An interview itself is not a story until it is shaped into one.
Studs Terkel's Working, long a staple of college anthropology and sociology courses, is a first-cousin to this category of non-directed interviewing. Terkel disappears into his interviews, which are artfully edited from transcriptions of answers to triggering questions. He talks to steelworkers, stockbrokers, waitresses, bus drivers, janitors, hookers, teachers, athletes, secretaries, cops, nurses, and a multitude of other people who all tell the stories of their working lives.
"If you're a real good salesman, you can put 'em in the car that you want and just forget about the car they want," a car salesman confides. "You can sell 'em the Brooklyn Bridge." A supermarket checker brags, "There isn't a thing you don't want that isn't in this store." A dentist admits something we always knew was true but hate to hear him say out loud: "No matter what you do, sometimes things just don't go right."
Wallace Terry's Bloods , An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans, is an album of interviews that also demonstrates the power of the non-directed interviewing technique-- allowing subjects to speak at length about their experiences, free-associating, in effect telling a story rather than answering specific questions. The voices of the men he interviewed are so diverse, honest, and eloquent that the combined effect is far greater than any single point of view could provide. And for each man it was a different war-- we can hear it in their voices, unfakably real, unabashedly emotional :
"I could smell the hate," recalls an electronics warfare officer, shot down and captured by Viet Cong. "I had come half a world away from Fayetteville, North Carolina-- the son of sharecroppers-- to die in North Vietnam at the hands of peasants."
A Marine rifleman, to whom the My Lai massacre was unremarkable, says, "When you're in combat, you can do basically what you want as long as you don't get caught. You can get away with murder."
Like so many experiences in our culture, the war came in two colors, black and white: An Army captain who recalls that the enlisted ranks of combat platoons were always full of blacks, says, "I was an absolute rarity in Vietnam. A black West Pointer commanding troops."
Because they say these things, the words take on immediacy and power: they were there. In such interviewing, the questions may or may not end up in the finished piece-- and there's no telling how long they rambled on with pointless reminiscences and clichés before they said the things Terry found quotable. But good questions provoke good answers.
Most people are surprisingly forthcoming with interviewers. They tell you amazing and intimate facts. Even when you expect them to lie, the confessional impulse often grips them and they tell you the truth instead. And if they lie, and you find out they're lying, all you have to do is present their remarks in a context that shows up the lie-- their nervous manner, documentary or eyewitness evidence that disputes their "truth," logic or common sense that is at odds with what they say.
Assuming an adversarial relationship can be a big mistake. The writer who comes on full of bluster and self-importance, or who immediately strikes a defiant and suspicious attitude, is not likely to establish the delicate human chemistry that results in good talk. Likewise, pretending to know too much--because you're afraid to look embarrassingly ignorant by asking a stupid question-- will keep you from learning the complex truth. There's no such thing as a stupid question, only an answer you'll never hear. Check your ego at the door.
Also, it's not uncommon to strike up a friendship in the course of an interview-- another reward of the craft.
But an adversarial attitude sometimes can be a tool, just like friendliness. "The point is, attitude is a choice," Bob Reiss says. "I always go in friendly. But I'll try something else if friendly doesn't work. Many successful interviewers go in tough. Their belief is, in that first moment, break through the defenses."
He cites an example from his experiences while researching his book about the rainforest, The Road to Extrema. "In Brazil, forest police were on strike. They'd barricaded themselves in their barracks and refused to talk to anyone. I took my reluctant translator over the barrier and walked up to four or five guys, who were playing dominoes. I was friendly. They refused to talk. I told the translator, 'Say to them'-- and this was a lie-- 'that I only wanted to talk to them because I heard they were bribed to go on strike.'
"The translator was afraid to say it. I said, 'Go ahead.' When the cops heard it, they blew up and started shouting the answers to my question: 'We weren't bribed! We're on strike because it's dangerous. We could get killed. Because we don't get paid. Because. . .' And on and on."
And while we tend to think of an interview as a single episode, a question-and-answer session recorded in a notebook or on tape, that's only one kind of interview. More often, an interview will take place over days, even weeks or months, of face-to-face conversations, e-mail dialogues, call-backs, and simple companionship. Particularly if you're doing a personal profile, it may be useful to keep yourself from writing any notes at all until you have had time to take the measure of the person you are profiling.
Remember three facts about human nature:
This doesn't mean your aim is to trick people into telling you embarrassing secrets. But people are complex and wonderful creatures, and they rarely reveal the most telling truths about themselves to a person they have just met in the first five minutes of talk. Conversations tend to range naturally, and one of the things that makes writing interesting is the element of surprise. Your subject may be delighted to have remembered something, or to have said something in a new way, or to have finally revealed a bit of personal truth he himself can use. Of course, the person you're interviewing might also admit to the Kennedy assassination-- oops. Here's where you get into that slough of situational ethics, the on-the-record -or-off debate. The simplest way to deal with it is to make it plain at the outset, gently but clearly, that everything said may wind up in the writing. If a subject explicitly asks you not to use something, do the right thing.
"One of the sad things about this craft, and Janet Malcolm put it most brutally, is that even when you're trying to be scrupulous, you know that you're likely to end up hurting people's feelings," says Ron Powers (Flags of Our Falthers), a writer with a deep sense of morality who, like all conscientious writers, struggles with the constant tension between truth-telling and honoring the trust of individuals who have confided to him their secrets. "We take advantage of the trust of the people we interview, and they always assume that what they say is going to reflect well on them. They don't realize the self-revelations that come up in conversation."
Malcolm's book, The Journalist and the Murderer, examines the relationship of writer Joe McGinniss and Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, convicted of murdering his wife and children-- though MacDonald always has maintained his innocence. McGinniss was offered the chance to become part of the defense team in order to have access to all the inside details of the case for his book, which Dr. MacDonald and his lawyers hoped would publicly exonerate him. But in the course of the trial, McGinniss concluded that MacDonald was indeed guilty-- and wrote it that way in Fatal Vision, which became a bestseller and a made-for-TV movie. MacDonald felt betrayed and sued him-- not for libel, but for fraud. McGinniss, MacDonald claimed, had gotten intimate information under false pretenses-- the pretenses of friendship and sympathy.
The case struck at the heart of the interviewer's relationship with his subject. As Malcolm relates the dramatic trial, political columnist William F. Buckley and former cop turned crime novelist Joseph Wambaugh both testified on McGinniss' behalf that it was common and accepted practice in the profession to mislead subjects in order to get information-- though there was some disagreement about what constituted an ethically unacceptable "lie" and an "untruth" told merely to urge a subject to talk. In the end, the jury could reach no unanimous verdict-- but was leaning toward MacDonald, so outraged were some of the jurors about his treatment at the hands of the writer.
It was clear that many of the people involved in the trial, including jurors, had only the murkiest notion of how writers interview real people and what professional standards govern their behavior as interviewers and their use of the material learned in an interview. And unfortunately the writers who testified didn't throw much light on the matter.
In order to keep from having to go through the ordeal of a new trial, and without admitting any wrongdoing, McGinniss agreed to pay MacDonald-- a man convicted of butchering a pregnant wife and two children-- $325,000. Apparently, in the eyes of at least some readers, there are things more reprehensible than multiple murder.
Malcolm's remarkable and disturbing book opens: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."
Strong words, and I know many writers who would disagree with them wholeheartedly. But, in a qualified way, Malcolm's point is well-taken: the people we interview often expect us to tell their story, when in fact we are using them to help us tell our story. The two may dovetail nicely-- but then again they may not.
Malcolm's cautionary`tale is required reading for any writer who aspires to tell the truth about people as an interviewer, using their own words, especially since she herself was sued by an interview subject, psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, who claimed she had invented or doctored quotes for a controversial New Yorker article on Sigmund Freud. Lower courts dismissed the suit without ruling on the question of whether she had indeed put words in her subject's mouth, but an appeal survived all the way to the Supreme Court. According to a Newsweek exclusive, five major news organizations were asked to sign amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs supporting Malcolm, but all refused-- a signal of just how uncomfortable straight journalists are with any suggestion of writerly tampering.
"Interviewing is a transaction in which both sides want something," says Anne Matthews, who has written for Forbes, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. "It's like snake-handling-- the lure of danger is on both sides, and it's fun."
Especially in a long profile or a book about a life, the tension between interviewer and subject can be palpable: the subject wants something from the writer-- notoriety, good publicity, vindication, a sense of importance, the relief of confession, or even the altruistic satisfaction of having told a helpful truth to someone who cares. And the writer obviously wants something-- insight, information, the "true gen"-- from the subject. The person being interviewed has no particular allegiance to the writer-- why should he? And the writer's true allegiance is to the story.
Should it be otherwise? Most writers I talked to say their first responsibility is to the truth of the story, yet many also say that, under some circumstances, they hedge that position out of decency, respect for privacy, or friendship. In her book, even Malcolm admits this. It's a judgment call of the most troubling kind. But I am reassured whenever a writer has such a nettling conscience-- it can moderate the worst excesses of ego and sharpen his or her sense of exactly what is necessary for the "truth" of the story.
It's not always right to tell everything you know, just for the sake of telling all.
It's the same situation true crime writer Jerry Bledsoe (Bitter Blood) alludes to when he speaks about how eager the family members of murder victims are to talk to a writer, who, they believe earnestly-- or perhaps it's only that they hope-- will tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but the truth as they see it. The truth that will prove their point of view.
One way around this thorny problem to let your subject know how you will quote her-- read quotes back to her over the phone. Some writers share the entire piece with the subject, especially if the subject is a close friend or family member. Other writers, particularly those pursuing stories with a controversial edge, are adamant about never showing the piece to the subject: announcing how you intend to write about someone can lead to a nightmare scenario-- the subject's lawyers move to block publication.
But checking your piece for accuracy with the interviewee is not always practical-- if you've interviewed dozens of people over time, or if they are not easy to find again. By the time I had returned to the states and begun writing my post-revolutionary Poland piece, there was no way to get in touch with all the people who had spoken into my notebooks. And even if I could, we did not share a common language-- I was relying on my interpreter's version of what they had said in the first place. I trusted my interpreter-- I had spent sixteen-hour days with him. And I trusted my notes. So I simply tried to be as accurate and fair as possible.
Even when it is practical to let your interviewee preview your piece, is it a good idea? The conventional wisdom among newspaper journalists is never-- in fact, usually the rules they work under forbid it-- though it is also standard practice to phone the subject of a story and read to him or her allegations or comments made by other sources, in order to solicit a fair reply. Informally, especially in less volatile stories and when a source seems to have mis-spoken, reporters sometimes call back interviewees to check important quotes for accuracy or clarification.
Such New Yorker notables as Joseph Mitchell (Up in the Old Hotel) writes about sharing proofs of profiles with the people he was writing about.
What if the subject insists on changes--is that a problem? In my experience, whenever I have shared a manuscript with a subject, he or she has asked for changes of the most trivial kind, and usually the changes make the piece that much more accurate. In an early version of Creative Nonfiction, I described Bob Reiss as speaking with a Brooklyn accent. He had lived in Brooklyn for years. He objected, and rightly-- to my ear, all New York accents were the same, but he had actually been raised in Manhattan, and he convincingly demonstrated the difference.
If you're interviewing government officials, self-important people, or if your topic is fairly sensitive-- and you'll always be surprised at what your interviewee finds sensitive-- you may be asked to supply questions in advance. Go ahead. Give several fairly basic questions. In the actual interview, use follow-up questions. One way or another, get around to asking what you came to ask.
Occasionally, a subject is too eager. I once showed up with a video documentary crew to interview a bank official in Hong Kong. He greeted us by saying, "I didn't know what you were going to ask, so I took the liberty of typing up some answers." I thanked him and we politely asked all our own questions anyway.
Does it matter where the interview takes place?
If you're looking for sheer information-- a statistic, a confirmation, a set of facts-- or if you're following up a previous meeting, or if the interviewee is someone you already know, or in a distant locale, a telephone interview may work just fine. It's a good idea to set up such a call in advance, to make sure you will reach the person you need to interview at a time when he or she has the leisure to talk, and also has the facts at hand which are the point of the interview.
Plenty of times, you simply have no choice. Having waited two weeks for a break in his hectic schedule, we wound up interviewing Christopher Patten, the last viceroy of Hong Kong, in a natatorium (swim club) in the boondocks of the New Territories, where he was giving a dedication speech. After he spoke, his people hustled him upstairs into a small gymnasium that echoed like a shower room. I would rather have interviewed him in the majesty of Government House, Union flag behind him, surrounded by all the trappings of Imperial office. But in that case we probably would have been interrupted by aides and urgent telephone calls. And seeing him in an open-collared shirt in a sterile environment, listening to him eloquently explain the legacy he planned to leave behind when the British handed over Hong Kong to the Chinese, I was struck by his sheer presence: Government House was just a symbol; he carried his real authority in who he was. In every word and gesture, he radiated the dignity of his office and the force of his convictions.
If personality or the place itself matters to the piece, pay attention to the ambience. Though it was unnerving at the time, in retrospect I was glad I had seen the Lenpol manager in his surrealistic workplace.
The first time I interviewed Jimmy James, he was head clown at the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus. We sat in the make-up tent on "clown alley" and he spoke in a soft voice about the rewards and hardships of the itinerant life he had chosen, all the while making up my face so I could perform with him in the matinee. Then he applied his own whiteface and paint, still talking as he transformed his friendly oval face into a sad clownish mask.
The second time I interviewed him, years later, he had become ringmaster of the only circus on the continent that still performs under canvas. The bigtop had just been raised by working elephants and a brigade of sweating roustabouts, and we sat on wooden bleachers while the circus band tuned up in the corner by the "backdoor." He wore his red ringmaster's regalia, impressively martial on such a large man, but his voice was still soft and his eyes still bright as a kid's as he told me confidently, "There will always be a circus."
People are different in different places. An executive who may be terse and doctrinaire in his office may become relaxed and philosophical wading in a trout stream. On the other hand, a scientist who seems rather dull and uncommunicative in her den may be transformed into an animated and fascinating personality in her laboratory, happily moving through the territory of her life's work, playing with props-- microscopes, bunsen burners, and petri dishes.
If you plan to profile a person, it's very often a good idea to interview him in a variety of locales. We become different people in different places. Our roles change, Our idea of ourself shifts. We put on different clothes-- a lab coat or a police uniform, blue jeans or a business suit-- and we put on a different personality.
And that rare subject who, no matter what the locale or circumstance, always remains constant, always talks in the same tone of voice and moves with the same body language and chooses the same figures of speech, teaches you an important truth about who he is.
Whenever the topic of interviewing comes up in my writing classes, students are always eager to know whether they should use a tape recorder. As I said, it's not a trivial question: it cuts to the heart of how we take human conversation-- spoken fact-- and turn into an artful story without distortion.
What they're really asking for is a basic definition of their relationship to their subjects and to the act of "creating" factual conversation-- how we record the real words of actual people and how we represent them on the page. It's as much a question of philosophy as of practice.
I favor recording phone interviews, partly because I hate talking on the phone and am afraid of missing something crucial, and connections are not always clear. An interview recorded via direct phone jack will often be clearer than the actual conversation-- just as a photograph will often reveal details invisible to the unaided eye.
But remember that you are obliged to ask the person on the other end of the line for permission to record what he says. If you don't, you're violating both his trust and, in at least eleven states, the law. You might as well ask permission again once he's agreed and the tape is rolling, just to protect yourself in case questions arise later.
Michael Pearson in "Twenty Questions: A Conversation with John McPhee," reports that McPhee, the dean of literary nonfiction writers, prefers not to use a tape recorder: "You'll get a better story without a tape recorder," McPhee tells him during their interview, published in the premier issue of Creative Nonfiction, ". . . Writing is selection. It's better to start choosing here and now."
But the recorder offers the advantage of total literal accuracy. Using it, the writer can capture in the exact words of the subject the entire conversation, then transcribe it at leisure, picking and choosing the pithiest quotes. It can protect the writer from claims of libel, and can make you a lot less nervous about quoting celebrities, statesmen, accused criminals, lawyers, and anybody else who may later take issue with how you portray him or her in print.
The recorder can preserve the sound of the subject's voice, the inflection and tone, the audible attitude she brings to the answers. This can be extremely valuable if you're working on a long project, or if weeks or months will elapse between the interviewing and the writing, when memory will intrude its tricks upon your research.
The taped voice can reassure you that a certain disparaging comment was meant as a joke-- or not. It can preserve the exact figures of speech used by the subject, the precise manner in which a remark was phrased. The laughter between remarks. The question to which a subject was responding.
Equally valuable can be the ambient sounds on the tape, which can evoke the reality of the place long after you have returned from it. When I listen to my tape of Jimmy James, the ringmaster, I can hear in the background trombones honking, elephants trumpeting, the tent boss calling orders to the roustabouts, diesel engines groaning, wooden seats slapping open, the pile driver spiking down the perimeter of the bigtop. My tapes from Poland carry the voices of Polish kids singing "Happy Birthday" in English and giggling at jokes about the Russians, while driftwood crackles on a lakeside campfire. The whole experience of our encounter returns in a powerful, sensuous way.
The great advantage of the recorder is that it allows you to pay attention to your subject, to actively listen, to be completely alert to the moment, because you're not distracted by the necessity of furious scribbling.
You can use your notebook to record the physical facts of the environment-- the leather furnishings, the trophies in the display case, the naked pin-up on the wall. You can makes notes about the appearance of the person-- haggard, tanned, squinting, smiling, steepling his hands, stroking her cat. What's she wearing? Does he look you in the eye? Is she relaxed or nervous? What about that mole on her nose, that ring in his ear, the Mont Blanc fountain pen in his pocket?
If you're in the field, moving, in bad light, riding in a car, helping to paddle a canoe, or in some other awkward position for note-taking, the recorder can be a terrific tool. Likewise, if you're talking to a group of people, the conversation may range too fast for notetaking, and a tape recorder can capture the various points of view.
Bob Reiss (The Coming Storm) adds: "Also, with a scientist, whose answers are technical, or a politician, whose answers depend on nuance, the memory of even a professional interviewer, a lay person, while accurate to the writer, can contain subtle but important inaccuracies to the subject."
But there are drawbacks.
Transcribing even a brief interview can take hours-- for Secret Soldiers I transcribed more than 75,000 words of interviews-- an entire book-- not including all my low-tech notes. Since I regularly work in radio, in addition to my microcassette and mini-disk, I have a broadcast-quality field recorder with a variable "pitch" control-- so I can slow down the tape and transcribe it without having to constantly pause and restart it, but the process is still a tedious one and far removed from making art. And most of what you transcribe will never find its way into the finished piece.
The obvious answer is not to transcribe the whole interview but only those parts you think you will use, but in practice that means you wind up taking notes on a taped interview and working from notes, then rechecking portions of the tape. Whenever I try this, I usually wind up transcribing the whole tape anyway and then working from the text. On a mini-disk, you can mark segments of the interview "1," "2," "3," etc., making a general note about the subject matter of that segment. This can save you transcribing a section that is unlikely to be of use, but you can also find it again to transcribe or consult, in case it turns out you were wrong and it is useful.
Even a notebook can come between you and a candid interview, and one sure way to spook a shy subject is to waltz in and plunk down a tape recorder. "There are times when you don't want to be obtrusively taking notes," Ron Powers (White Town Drowsing) says. "It's not that you want to be secretive about it, or duplicitous, but when the person's eye sees you writing stuff down, or sees a spool moving on the tape recorder, it changes the way they talk. It freezes them sometimes, or inhibits them, or causes them to censor themselves."
So some writers, in certain situations, must rely on memory until they can get to a notebook or a recorder and commit to it their best recollection of what they just heard. In writing about hoboes, for example, Ted Conover (Rolling Nowhere) knew a tape recorder would be out of the question. Even whipping out a notebook at the wrong moment could get him injured or killed-- hoboes are suspicious by nature, and many of the ones Conover traveled among were violent and mentally unstable. So he made notes whenever he had the opportunity, paying attention, then trusting his memory. And hiding his notebook.
Even if you use a recorder, you may wind up doing exactly what Conover did-- because recorders are machines, and machines malfunction, usually at the worst possible moment. Batteries suddenly go dead, tape unravels, a sudden cloudburst or a spilled cup of coffee shorts out the electronics. You drop it. You forget to put a tape in it. You forget to depress the "record" button.
Or, the classic heartbreaker: you record it perfectly, and then accidentally erase it.
And, just as a tape recorder picks up ambient, evocative sounds, it also picks up ambient masking sound-- noise that interferes with the voices on the tape.
In the Afterword of The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm meditates on the use of the tape recorder as a literary tool, and she comes down on McPhee's side: "Texts containing dialogue and monologue derived from a tape-- however well-edited the transcript may be-- always retain some trace of their origin (almost a kind of metallic flavor) and lack the atmosphere of truthfulness present in work where it is the writer's own ear that has caught the drift of the subject's thought." This seems disingenuous-- I hear her really complaining that having the literal transcript available cramps her style in embellishing and paraphrasing inside quotation marks.
No matter how you record an interview, as a writer you always apply art to what the subject says-- in Malcolm's phrase, you owe it to the subject "to translate his speech into prose." In practice, this means interpreting extemporaneous speech into presentable language that does justice to the truth of what the subject is trying to say.
So the verbatim truth of the recorder is only one truth after all, an approximate truth, and not necessarily the most valuable one. It may mislead, because of necessity you can use only part of it. So you have to make sure the part you use reflects the overall integrity of the whole. There's a paradox here, but one that, in the era before tape recorders, writers resolved in the very way they noted the spoken words of others-- already leaving out repetitions and irrelevancies, closing up awkward pauses, omitting stumbles. Even the act of punctuating spoken words is an act of artistic interpretation.
When the interview finds its way into your piece, it will make the transformation in pieces-- selected, edited for sense, truncated, all out of the original order.
But, as near as you can make it so, accurate.
You listen. You record-- in memory, on paper, on tape or disk. Then you exercise your best story sense and fashion a piece of artistic truth-- a true story. This requires sound judgment and the craft to capture truth in the exact words of another person-- exact, but not entire and not verbatim. Not the whole truth-- but at least nothing but the truth.
Because you're not a stenographer. You're a writer.
* Adapted from Creative Nonfiction-- Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life (Story Press, 1996).