On Interviewing

In Reporting on Your Own and Writing about People: The Interview, Kalita and Zinsser provide us with guidelines for effective interviewing of people. Interviewing, they argue, is more than reporting what we discover or asking and answering questions, but is a process in which we learn peoples’ actions and thoughts, and unlearn what we think we know. “We’re telling our subjects’ stories, not our own.” (Kalita 49)  Whether an experienced writer like Zinsser or a rookie future sociologist like me, Interviewing is best (and early) mastered through practice. Consequently, to apply their approaches we must start by interviewing.

Interviewing is itself a process. According to Zinsser, first, we must choose an interviewee “so unusual that the average reader would want to read about the person”, second, if we do not know the interviewee, we must get him or her to trust us in order to avoid awkward silences or fear; third, we must do our homework, have an idea of what questions to ask and be prepared to direct the interview based on our intuition or on different directions than our initial and finally, we must choose a method (based on our preferences) of taking notes of the interviewee’s answers. (104)

Kalita’s approach focuses on how to report our own community to a general audience. From her experience she explains that “journalists personally connected to that context [his or her community] should use extra caution to get facts and perspectives precisely right…  We obviously must stay free of obligation, but we shouldn’t also get in the way of our own work.”(49)

Kalita and Zinsser’s guidelines will be extremely useful for my multimedia project, “Living to Tell My Story”. Rather than simply applying my ethnographic method, their approaches give me a better understanding of the process of interviewing and more flexibility with what questions to ask and how to interact with my interviewees.

For my project I have many interviewees in mind: my parents, friends and neighbors I know I want to record my interviewees and take notes (just in case); however I am still debating if I should “do my homework” and prepare a specific questionnaire focused on my life or follow Michael Apted’s manner of interviewing in the Up! Series, a mixture of broad  questions based on intuition and the interviewees’ answers. Since settling this issue has been my main problem (so far) with my project, I may reach a midpoint between both approaches: ask my interviewees specific question about me (e.g. Where do you see me in 14 years?) and questions based on their answers [e.g. Do you believe Washington Heights, my community, will be more than what people expect (i.e. "Dominicanland") ?] Surely, I am noticing that Kalita and Zinsser could not be more right, the process of interviewing is much more than I had expected.

*References:

Kalita, S.Mitra. “Reporting on Your Own”. Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. New York: Plume, 2007. Print.

Zinsser, William. “Writing About People: The Interview”. On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.