Interviewing

The Art and Science of Interviewing

The process of interviewing is all about gathering anecdotal and factual information that can become the story in your book or film. The method that you use to interview depends on partly the intended delivery method. For example, is it a film or a book? If it's a book you really only need to be concerned about recording your interview so that you can remember what is sad for later when you're actually writing your book. For a film or video you need to record in a way that the recorded results can be used inside of your film as video footage or at least audio dialogue.

Make Storytelling Safe and Fun 

Interviewing is really the process of helping someone tell a story. The process is helping that person to access memories that are stored in their mind in a way that works for them. One of the most common methods is to ask questions and then be silent and allow the subject to answer the questions. The best interviewers set aside their own values and judgements and avoid criticizing or giving advice or arguing with the subject. The use of allowing or accepting without condoning is the best approach. That way the subject feels at ease and not judged and is able to tell their story more easily.

Open Questions

Questions specifically though are in two different types or more actually. The two most common types of questions are open questions and closed questions. Open questions can be most useful because they don't predetermine the answer that the person is going to give and that can lead to all sorts of surprising and new information that the interviewer wasn't expecting or didn't even know existed. So when asking open questions we ask things like, “Would you please describe a little bit about your mom's personality?” or “What do you remember about your growing up?” or “How would you describe your father's career?” These questions are deliberately built so that any answer is the right answer. This type of open probing questions are very useful to gather new information.

Closed Questions
On the other hand often when we are interviewing people what we're trying to do is to clarify information that we already have, to confirm or add to it. So sometimes closed questions work better. For example you might have discovered two different dates of birth for an ancestor. So when you're interviewing someone who you think might know for sure you would use a closed question like, “So was Grandpa born on April 1st 1910 or May 28th 1910? That closed question clearly lays out the two options that are the answer that you're expecting and when the person gives you their answer (presuming the answer is one of those two) they are giving you absolute clarity on what they think the information is.

Follow The Energy With Followup Questions

Interviewing is an art form and the biggest challenge is that with every answer provided by the subject multiple follow-up questions can be indicated. For example when you ask someone to talk about their education and they talk about high school they're going to talk about all sorts of things including classes, subjects, sports, interests, friends, events, love relationships, career options, military and significant family events. Because we are allowing the person to tell the story in a way that opens the doors to their own memories the best way is to follow the energy, follow the passion, follow the flow. So if someone in the course of talking about their high school days talks about their first love relationship a lot then if you're following the energy one of the most powerful follow-up questions would be “Would you share about about the relationships you’ve had in your life?” Very likely that person is primed and ready to go and will take you to some very deep and meaningful places in their storytelling. On the other hand if you ignore their storytelling about their first love relationship and follow up with a question about work or career or further education they probably won't be that excited or passionate in the moment an unmotivated and it's going to be very difficult later to get them back into talking about love relationships. Follow the energy.

Record Everything

During your interview you'll want to use a recording device of some sort or several. Your own smartphone probably has a pre-loaded application or one that you can download that will turn it into a handy dandy audio recorder. You simply just put the cell phone in record mode and place it near the person you're interviewing and it will record the sound of their voice. Make sure you put your phone on Do Not Disturb mode so it's not buzzing and vibrating.

Take Notes & Manage Storytelling

Taking notes with a pen and notepad is advisable because it's easy to get lost and be confused about what has been said and what has not been said yet. The time from the moment you arrive to do the interview until the time you turn on your recorder is risky because people tend to start telling their story before you are recording. One trick that I use is to deliberately do small talk with somebody while setting up the recorder because I don't want them to say something really powerful and meaningful before the recorder is on. I won't remember to ask them about it later probably.

Turning Voice To Text With YouTube

Once you have an audio recording of your interview with the person you can easily make a simple video file from the audio and upload it to YouTube. YouTube will create a caption file. It will do voice recognition on everything that it's hearing your subject say and we'll give you a text file to download that you can edit that and that becomes part of the copy for your book or a transcript for maneuvering through your interview recording.

Interview Tools

Inside the bookmakers course folder that was shared with you you'll find several documents that can make your interviewing easier. You can download out of that folder the Life Story Questionnaire and the Family Tree Charts. These are good documents to help you think of things to ask and also a place to write them down. In that folder is also a document called Interview Questions 110 that will give you a bunch of questions you can review to help figure the appropriate follow-up questions that you might ask.

Multiple Interviewees

It is recommended that you only interview one person at a time for several reasons. Multiple people will talk over each other and that will be challenging for your audio recording. and if you're following the energy then the question becomes whose energy are you following? Likely if you have multiple people in front of you you'll be following the person with the most powerful energy and potentially missing out on stories and recollections from those who are more quiet. If you must interview multiple people at once be very methodical and firm in controlling the amount of time each person speaks and be certain to call on each person equally. Firmly but sweetly shut down any cross talking and over speaking so each person gets their due.

More Interviews
You can do follow-up interviews if you need to so once you've digested the material you've got during the first interview you can call back or set up another date to interview and I get clarifications or go more deeply into certain areas that you're looking for more information around.

Online Interview Tools

During the COVID-19 Pandemic using remote digital methods to interview somebody is very wise and even in some cases more useful. For example if you're using Zoom you can share your screen and show your interview subject photos or documents that might help trigger their memories. Other applications like FaceTime Facebook Messenger and Google Hangouts may be useful tools for interviewing. The most important part is that the tool has a built-in recording function. Be certain you turn on the recording function right at the very beginning and advise the person that you are recording and for them to a share accordingly. I always tell people that I am holding in confidence everything that they say except for what goes into the final book or film and ask them not to say anything that is top secret or potentially embarrassing.

BE BOLD
Lastly, Be bold. I always advise people that I'm interviewing that I'm going to ask them all sorts of questions and some of them they might not like. I give them permission to say “Pass” or “Ask me something else.” But I ask about everything in a human life.

My grandmother used to say that there’s five topics that were not allowed to be spoken about around the family dinner table. They were politics, religion, money, love, and sex. But we know that those are topics that your intended audience for your book or film will have to make decisions around. Those topics hold great wisdom and so you are encouraged to ask about those things. Be bold!