The first thing I learned about interviews is to not put my recording device directly on the table. If someone taps on the table, that sound will resonate through the surface. It will be very loud in your recording. 

Who to interview? 

If you’re writing about a specific topic, make a list of experts and/or people with lived experience. Take some time to research who is out there. Who would you like to speak with most? Put them at the top of the list and work down from there. 

Contact people one at a time, or for a bigger piece, maybe in twos or threes. Wait until you get a response before moving on. You don’t want to contact 30 people and end up only interviewing two of them. This wastes your time and theirs. 

Profiles vs. Other Pieces 

A profile focuses on a single person. For instance, I interviewed astronaut Robert Thirsk for a profile piece in INSPIRED 55+. Since the article was mainly about him, I didn’t interview anyone else. 

For something longer or less focused on an individual, you’ll want multiple interlocutors. Try to vary the perspectives you get. 

When I wrote about women in British Columbia who sail their own boats, I cast a wider net to see who might be interested in providing a quote. I included women who sail, of course. I also included comments from people who worked in the marine industry. 

Since my aim was to provide commentary from a variety of people, I didn’t end up interviewing most of my interlocutors in any detail. Think of it like a deep dive versus an overview. 

Balancing Interviews and Other Information 

For the women who sail article, quotations from interviews only made up a small portion of the text. The meat of the piece relied on other research and information. The quotes were there to enliven the story and make it real (Look! These are actual humans!). 

Context for the quotes is key. Introduce the topic first. Then expand on it with some contextual or factual background information. What point are you trying to make? Your quotes should support the point if each paragraph where they appear. 

Here are four tips I’ve gleaned from my interviewing experiences. 

Get a Good Recording 

This might seem obvious, but as I said, things can interfere with your recording that you may never have thought about (like someone gently tapping a table, which sounds like gunshots when you play it back).  

Where should you meet? While a cafe seems neutral and appropriate, they tend to be noise-riddled spaces. Even seemingly quiet cafes might have coffee grinders, or someone’s dog might start barking outside (or inside), or a baby might cry, or there might be that one customer whose voice carries through the whole place above all other conversation. Even if your recording comes out well, you might find yourself distracted throughout the interview. 

A better place to meet is a library study room, an office, or (if appropriate) at someone’s house (unless there is also a risk of barking dog/crying baby, or yard work, or neighbors vacuuming…) 

Outside can be okay if it’s sheltered from traffic noises. And wind. Wind is the worst possible thing for a recording. If you are going to be outside, put a sock or glove over your recording device. There’s a reason those film boom mics have big fuzzy things on them. (Fun fact apropos of nothing: The fuzzy things are called dead-cats.) 

Take Notes as You Go 

Even though you are recording, jot down anything that jumps out at you in the moment. When you’re watching a person speak and hearing their words for the first time, things can resonate in a way that gets lost with just a recording. Especially if it’s only audio, with no visual. 

Taking notes by hand has also been shown to help with memory (see https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-hand-is-better-for-memory-and-learning/ ). Actively taking notes during an interview helps you focus. It speeds you through your writing process, because when you sit down to write, you will already retain more of what was said. 

The things you write down can also help you focus your article (book chapter, etc.). These are things that you found significant or meaningful. Maybe it was a particular turn of phrase. Maybe it was a fact that you didn’t know before. Maybe your interlocutor said something that contradicted what they said in a different conversation, or that you read about them. Or maybe there’s something you want to follow up on later, but you don’t want to interrupt them in the moment. 

Don’t Transcribe Everything, Just What You Need 

Once you have your recording, you’ll want to go back over it. Transcription takes way longer than you think (unless you’ve done a lot of transcription, in which case you know why professional transcribers charge so much). Instead of trying to capture every word, just play back the recording and transcribe the passages you will actually use. If you need general information instead of exact quotes, then you can take notes like you would in a lecture. Except you can pause the speaker (which would have been helpful when I was in university). 

Even better, if you’re recording the meeting on a video call service, turn on captions. This will automatically generate a transcript of your conversation. Sure, the transcript will contain some minor errors, but that’s what the recording is for. Anyway, you’ll only end up using a few pieces.  

Which leads me to the next point. 

Identify the Most Fitting Quotes 

In my experience, you will inevitably end up with more than you can use. Unless you’ve conducted an extremely focused and specific interview, you won’t be able to use it all. Anthropologists have boxes of unused notes and data in their attics (or digital boxes in their dusty digital basements). You can never use it all. 

When I interviewed puppeteer Tim Gosley for Inspired 55+, we spoke for about an hour. The article was 800 words. For comparison, this article you are currently reading is about 1,000 words. 

In that contained space, I had to introduce Tim, give some information about his life, patch in a few quotes, give some more information, describe him a little, and detail some of his work. In 800 words. So yeah. Most of what we talked about, no matter how fascinating, never saw the light of day. 

This limitation is actually helpful though. Once you pull a few quotes, you can think about how they connect. What is the theme of your project? Where is the focus? Do you want readers to know what it feels like to be in this person’s presence? Are you more interested in facts about their childhood? Do you want to convey their voice and follow the topics that they emphasized themselves? 

For me, this process is iterative. I pull some quotes, I write a few lines about the person or the topic, then I see what quotes might fit with that, or how I will get to the next segment or subtopic. Even when I pull interesting quotes, I end up with more than I can use. 

At least in your early drafts you don’t need to worry too much about word count. Write a little more than what you need. Then pare it down to its clean essentials. Don’t be afraid to make a mess. It’s a bit like collage. The picture will gradually emerge as you tame it. 

The more interviews you incorporate into your work, the smoother this process will become for you. One final tip though: Interviews are exhausting. They can be brilliant and fun, or (rarely) tedious and boring, but they are always tiring. Don’t schedule more than two on the same day. Really you should only do one a day, if you can help it. That way, it’ll stay fresh in your mind. 

Interviews can add depth and polyvocality to your nonfiction writing. Get a solid recording and integrate the right quotes to support what you’re trying to say. Then send your work out into the world and figure out who you’ll interview next! 

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We first connected with Neely Tubati Alexander during her debut novel’s publication and featured her in our May/June 2023 Issue‘s Breaking In column. Now that her next publication is hitting the shelves today, we’re reconnecting with her for a quick Q&A.

What was the time frame for writing this latest book?

I’ve kept a book a year pace since my debut Love Buzz came out in 2023, which means a lot of writing in the “in between.” This pace means I’ve had my hand in three books at once in some capacity—final touches on covers and formatting while planning marketing on one, going through developmental edits and/or attempting to sell the next, while drafting yet another! It can be exhausting, but this promise of something new perpetually on the horizon keeps me from getting too wrapped up in the things I can’t control surrounding publishing a book, of which there are many.

Has your perspective on the publication process changed since your debut was published?

Yes! So much. I think when I debuted, I had this “I’m just happy to be here” mentality, and I still very much do. But as I’ve progressed, I’ve learned more about the industry and business. Sticking creatives into a business model like traditional publishing can very much be a square peg, round hole situation at times. I’ve come to rely heavily on author friends to share intel and knowledge. This transparency helps us authors advocate effectively for ourselves. I also appreciate how much of a collaboration it truly is.

What was the biggest surprise while getting this book ready for publication?

How each process can feel unique and new. Granted, this is only my third book so perhaps this outlook will change, but each book has the opportunity to bring something new, whether it be introduction to a new subset of readers, a fun or unexpected blurb, an exciting partnership…the opportunities are truly endless and each new book feels like an exciting fresh start with a world of possibilities.

What do you feel you did really well with this novel?

This being my third book, I feel like I am really coming into my specific style and voice, and I think this book highlights my genre-blending style. Every book I write, I feel like I get better as a writer and am more capable than with the last. Perhaps it’s confidence, perhaps it’s intuition, perhaps it’s skill building … I tend to think it’s a combination of all three.

Anything you would have done differently?

There are always things after a book comes out that I wonder about. Every once in a while, a reader will say, “I thought such and such was going to happen,” and I’ll think, well that would have been a better ending! Authors love to tinker, and I think that process would be never-ending if we allowed it to be. I try to block out the noise and just go where the story takes me. Trust the process, as they say, which really just means to trust yourself.

Would you like to share some advice for our readers?

Comparison is indeed the thief of not only joy, but motivation and creativity. I’ve seen so many debut authors get bogged down by comparing themselves to more seasoned authors or even other debuts, being so focused on what someone else is getting and thus losing much of the joy of that special time. And it’s definitely not just debuts. We all do it. But if your goal is to make a career out of writing, put your head down for the marathon instead of trying to keep up with the mass sprint. My goals used to be centered around accolades. Now, they are built around longevity.

What’s next for you?

I am shifting to women’s fiction! While my next book has some romantic elements, it shifts out of romance and solidly into the women’s fiction space. I am excited to take this new leap and potentially connect with new readers while also (hopefully) keeping my current ones. I hope to see this book on shelves in 2026!

Where can our audience find you online?

Instagram: @neelyalexanderwrites
Website: NeelyTubatiAlexander.com

The post Breaking Out: Neely Tubati Alexander appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Pat Barker is a writer’s writer. Though she’s accumulated numerous accolades over her decades-long career, including a Booker Prize and a Guardian Fiction Prize, and was made a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for her services to literature, she still concerns herself with things like what it means to write effective dialogue and looking past the bad first draft to see if a story has legs. “The thing about writing is it’s not difficult,” Barker says, now in her early 80s. “The rules of good writing are incredibly simple. It’s just that it takes you 50 years to learn.” 

This sense of humor about her writing life filled our conversation ranging from her opinion on whether a writer’s unfinished work should be published posthumously (“I do actually have a horror of leaving an orphan book where you can imagine your publisher and your executor and your agent say, ‘Oh, well, it’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it? But on the other hand, perhaps we can just about rescue it and push it out.’ I don’t want all that. I want any book that’s published under my name to have been finished”) to what she told herself about winning the Booker prize to be able to keep working (“It’s such a stroke of luck. But that’s all it is. … Julian Barnes said it was ‘posh bingo,’ and I said, when I won it, it was three lemons in a row. And that’s the way to look at it. If you start seriously thinking that you have written the best novel of the year, then you are in trouble. You haven’t. You’ve written the novel that five random people agreed on, on a particular afternoon. That’s what you’ve written.”) 

Joking aside, Barker is best known for her novels set during times of war. Her Regeneration Trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road—which won the Booker in 1995) follows the poet Siegfried Sassoon, psychiatrist Dr. William Rivers, and soldier Billy Prior as they deal with the horrific effects of trench warfare in World War I. Likewise, the Life Class Trilogy (Life Class, Toby’s Room, Noonday) begins with art students Elinor Brooke, Paul Tarrant, and Kit Neville in 1914 and traces the intertwining of their lives from the earliest days of World War I through the destruction of London during the Blitz of World War II. 

Currently, Barker is in the midst of her Women of Troy series, beginning with The Silence of the Girls. The 2018 novel, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, retells the story of The Iliad from the perspective of Briseis, the Trojan queen who was awarded to Achilles during the Trojan War. Briseis’s story continues in The Women of Troy, as the Greeks’ departure from Troy is delayed due to unfavorable winds, courtesy of the gods they’ve offended during the destruction of the city. The newest book in the series, The Voyage Home, shifts the narrative from Briseis to that of Ritsa, a healer who has been given to Agamemnon’s war prize, the virgin Cassandra, as her slave, as they travel from Troy to Mycenae, where Agamemnon’s wife awaits. 

When asked what appeals to Barker about writing a trilogy or series, she says, “The great thing about writing a trilogy is that you can’t get away with just repeating. You have to have central characters, but you can’t just have them thinking and doing and saying exactly what they did in the previous book, so you are obliged to dig deeper into that person.” Which is exactly what she’s done with the stories of Briseis and now, Ritsa. 

And while Barker is dedicated to completing Briseis’s story in The Women of Troy series, she says she won’t be embarking on a new trilogy or series: “… of course, I am now too old to write another trilogy. So somehow or other, I’ve got to come to my senses and write a single book or books.” 

We began our conversation with what interested Barker about revisiting ancient mythology.

Before I got The Voyage Home, I went back and read your Life Class Trilogy, and there was a line in there about the silence of the girls as Achilles and Agamemnon fought over them. That book was published in 2007, at least in the United States.

You know, I’d forgotten that I wrote that. So, when people ask me when The Silence of the Girls was published, “When did your interest in The Iliad and the women in The Iliad start?” I thought it was comparatively recent. Whereas in fact, it went back quite a way. I’ve forgotten I wrote that about, Elinor Brooke sitting in the Cafe Royal noticing how silent the women have become, and how objectionably loud the men have become.

So, if you didn’t remember you had that interest before, what did spark the idea for this trilogy?

We’ll perhaps call it a series, yes, there will be something next. Certainly, because the character [Briseis] is not finished. 

What did spark it? Well, I suspect an even earlier introduction to The Iliad, because I read it out of general interest. Like lots of young women, my predominant experience was, well, the grandeur of the language, and how almost inconceivably ancient these stories are, some of the earliest stories that we, as human beings ever told each other that took final form, or not final form actually, in The Iliad. But there were these girls, and the girls were saying nothing, and I think quite a lot of men, not all men by any means, would read that, and they wouldn’t hear the silence. But I think almost any woman would hear that silence. So obviously the thing to do if you’re a woman writer is to try to break that silence, to try to express what the women are feeling and not able to say.

Did you know the scope of what these three books would cover before you started writing the first one?

No, and I don’t think I really knew, even at the end of The Silence of the Girls, because I do tend to get very down on myself at the end of the book. When I sent off The Silence of the Girls to my British publisher, Penguin Random House—it’s the same publisher on both sides of the Atlantic now—I thought it was absolute rubbish. I said that in an event at which my editor was present, and he couldn’t believe it. But it was absolutely true, because the book that you actually hand over is never the book that was in your mind when you started to write it. Every book falls short, I think, of what the writer intended. That one fell dramatically short because I was seeing it against the backdrop of The Iliad, which is one of the greatest books ever written.

At what point did you decide to continue the story with the next two books?

It’s always this nagging when a story is finished. And unfortunately, for my sins, I seem to finish a book at the point where it’s the end of a movement, but it’s not the end of the piece. There is something left on set, just like the Regeneration Trilogy, when at the end of Regeneration, Siegfried Sassoon is going back to war, but he’s still not convinced that the war is anything other than a dreadful mistake. Yet he has to go back and face the horrors of that again. No way is that the end of the story. You need to follow this person. You need to bring your central character to a moment of more than momentary peace. And that is the end of the story. I’ve now written three trilogies, and I don’t seem to be very good at ending it at the end of one book.

I wanted to talk about completing the story of a character because with The Voyage Home, you did shift narrators. With the first two, Briseis was the narrator, but in this third book, it’s Ritsa. What challenges did you face writing from this different character? Or did it open things up for you?

I think it opened things up for me, and it also restored me to the earliest voices in my work, which were very much the voices of working-class women in the northeast of England. Very poor women, women who were up against it. And Ritsa, although she’s living in a very different society, her relationship to the other characters in the story is very much that she is the bottom layer. She is the ground feeder if you like. She’s a slave. Before she was enslaved, she was a healer. She was a woman with independence. She was a woman with a professional reputation, a home of her own. So, although she hasn’t fallen from the great heights of Briseis, who was a queen in her previous life and then a slave, she, nevertheless, has suffered a very dramatic loss of status. She has become Cassandra’s slave, at her beck and call 24 hours a day. She doesn’t like it very much. She doesn’t like Cassandra very much. 

Nevertheless, her voice is a very pragmatic voice, a voice which is focused on survival rather than on ideology, if you like. She wants to be alive at the end of the story, and she’s in a better place at the end of the story than she was at the beginning. So, I think from the point of view of the reader who is identifying with Ritsa, this is an awkward trajectory. 

I do think this very simple thing is quite important, that you don’t want to take your reader into a pit and leave them there. Apart from anything else, I think it’s quite immoral to do that. I think you should always offer hope. And it’s honest, because if you are actually despairing, you wouldn’t be writing. The act of writing is itself an affirmation of hope that things can be better.

That’s so interesting considering that you write so much about war.

I do write about a lot of traumatic events. But I also write a lot of recovery stories. And I would say that the survival rate in my books is higher than the survival rate in life. In that sense, I’m a very optimistic writer.

Going back to the narrators, I can guess why you chose to have the few chapters in The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy that are from Achilles’ and Pyrrhus’ perspectives in the third person, since they’re the men and this is about the silence of the girls and giving them a voice. But I was curious about, in this new book, why you chose to give Cassandra’s and Clytemnestra’s perspectives in third person.

Yes, and Ritsa’s in first. But in a way, it’s brutally simple: Ritsa’s alive at the end. You can’t get trapped inside the viewpoint of a woman who is not going to make it all the way through. I mean, I think some books do this, or they flip into the afterlife or something like that. But mainly if the word I is being used, you expect that I not to be in a coffin at the end of the book, because otherwise they’re describing their own death and can’t describe what happens after it. … 

It’s a way of saying, although these characters are very evenly balanced in the call for the reader’s sympathy, nevertheless, the first-person narrator is generally the person the book is about. In my books, the first-person narrator tends to be an honest narrator. They are telling you what they know. They might be misleading you, but if they are misleading you, it’s only because they don’t know the truth themselves. I don’t play games with the reader in that sense.

In another interview, you talked broadly about why retellings of mythology are experiencing a surge these days. But I’m curious, for you personally, what appeals to you about reimagining myths?

It’s that imaginative power of knowing that you are dealing with the story which has been around for at least two and a half thousand years. Because the stories that formed The Iliad, for example, had been around probably a thousand years before it was actually captured in the form that we now know it, and there’s a danger in thinking that capture, The Iliad, is the final form. But of course, it isn’t. The myth can’t be frozen in that way. The myth goes on, so that Shakespeare in 1602 writing about Troilus and Cressida is also telling one of the stories in the myths that made The Iliad, and so on into modern-day retellings. It’s endlessly rich because it delves into some of the deepest emotions and convictions of human life. I think it’s very humbling to be part of a chain of writers telling a particular story. You are a custodian of the story. In the end, it is not about you, and that’s what I like about it.

Have you found any benefits in writing about wars or events that are so far in the past, compared to trying to write about something that is in the relatively recent past?

There’s a great benefit in the sense that if you’re writing about the contemporary scene, the reader already knows what they think about the contemporary scene. The point about writing about myth or writing about the relatively distant past is that the reader doesn’t have the knee-jerk reaction, Oh I know what I think about that. So, you come in under their radar, and you move past the automatic prejudices and get them to look at the basic situation again, and to feel different things about it. For me, that’s the main reason. 

The other thing of course, is this: Even the very distant past, you are still dealing with homo sapiens. The human brain has not evolved during that time. So, as [A. E.] Housman said, the person who’s looking at the storm on Wenlock Hill in Roman times is essentially the same man who’s looking at it now. The trees have changed, but the human brain has not changed. It’s a way of getting down to a deeper level of human complexity.

What comes first for you when you’re starting a new project? The idea for the story or a character’s voice?

I feel that the project doesn’t start until you’ve got the voice. I call it “the breath on the mirror.” If there’s no breath on the mirror, it’s dead. And once the characters are talking to each other, even if there’s no story and I don’t know what it’s about, I stop worrying because once they’re talking to each other and disagreeing with each other about various things, you know you are going to have a story very quickly. 

I wish I could tell people how to hasten that process, but I don’t know how to. It can take ages to get to the point where you are hearing the characters talking, or it can happen almost immediately. I think the only real tip I’ve got is if you’re writing in third person and the characters are not coming to life, switch to first person. Even if you don’t intend to stick with it, at least write something in first person and do the sensory things. …

When you let the characters talk to each other, as you’re figuring out this story—

I can’t stop them. [Laughs] If it’s working, they won’t shut up!

Are you actively writing this down or typing it? Or are you allowing it to happen in your head until you do get that spark of the story?

I allow it to happen in my head, and I’m grateful that it’s happening. Now and then, if I think somebody says something vaguely significant, I will write it down in a notebook and wait for the moment in the story where they’ll reach the point of saying this. But, the first-person narration—and part of the last three books now have been first-person narration—is, in fact, dialogue. It’s a monologue. The person is talking to the reader. So, first person and reliance on dialogue do go very much together. 

I think dialogue is absolutely key to everything, and it’s very difficult because you can read books on characterization, narrative, conflict, and all that. But dialogue is so dependent on the individual ear. You probably could get more from a scriptwriter or somebody teaching theater writing than you could get from somebody teaching a novel on dialogue. 

I actually have quite a bee in my bonnet about dialogue when I think about it, because I think a lot of the things that are said are nonsense. Like “every person has to sound completely different from every other person,” and it’s not the way things are. I mean, if you’ve got five blokes going into the bar of a golf club for their hard-earned pint at the end of the day, you can make them sound completely different because you can say that one is Scottish, one is Welsh, one is Irish, one is a visiting American, and they will sound different. But it misses the point because what they are doing is to make the same sounds about the same subject. What they are saying is, “We belong here.” There’s no actual content in the speech at all. It’s the weather. It’s who was par or whatever—I know nothing about golf on the course—and things like that. It’s just saying: “We belong here, and we don’t threaten you. We are prepared to be friends.” 

It’s exactly the same when the kittiwake lands on the ledge and watches a thousand other kittiwakes. It says, “Kittiwake.” If it says anything else, it’s in trouble. It’s the kittiwake theory of dialogue. It’s the voice of a community, not the individual voices. Just like, for example, as you get in James Baldwin sometimes, where you get people in the religious community and they’re saying things like, “Praise the Lord.” They are saying, “We belong to this community. We share these beliefs.” They’re not saying anything that reveals them as an individual. And obviously, you need dialogue that reveals the individual, but you also need the voice of the community out of which the individual voice emerges. But, you know, I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about dialogue. [Laughs]

Do you have a writing routine: time of day that you write or a target word count?

It varies at the moment. I write in the mornings. It’s 1,000-plus words a day, which I’m just starting a new project. All I need it to do at the moment is grow. And I need to stifle the voice in my head saying, This is rubbish. It’s not worth doing. The only way to do that is to plow on day by day because you can’t make any sensible judgments about a project until you’ve got a first draft. I used to have a little thing on the top of my screen: “It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be finished.” And you worry about it being good when it’s there. Until that point, it doesn’t matter really. It just has to be there.

So, you’re not one of those writers who has to revise the previous day’s work before you move on to today’s work?

No, I leave sometimes in the middle of a sentence, deliberately, or in the middle of a word so I can finish the end of the word and the end of the sentence with no thought at all. Then just move on. 

It’s all about conning yourself at the early stages. You’ve got to con yourself into finishing. Because everybody, at some stage, everybody who isn’t a complete—I won’t use four-letter words—thinks their work is rubbish some of time. I would distrust any writer who never thought their work was rubbish. So, it’s a matter of shutting that voice up long enough for you to be able to see what you’ve got.

I talk to writers all the time, but I still find it so reassuring to hear writers of your stature feel the need to con yourself, to make yourself believe that your work can be something good, even if it’s not right now.

You’re only as good as your last paragraph, and if you’re writing a very rough first draft, your last paragraph is always rubbish. If you’ve got a problem, you’ve got a problem of belief, and somehow, you’ve got to find a way to believe, even though your last paragraph was rubbish. Winning prizes and stuff like that, which you might think would help, it doesn’t help in the least.

Is there any advice that you have for the readers of WD that we haven’t talked about?

Keep going, but don’t focus too much on the externals of recognition and publishing. You have to enjoy the journey. 

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We first connected with Nikki May during her debut novel’s publication and featured her in our January/February 2022 issue‘s Breaking In column. Now that her next publication is hitting the shelves today, we’re reconnecting with her for a quick Q&A.

What was the time frame for writing this latest book?

Forever! At least that’s what it felt like.

I started working on my second book before my debut, Wahala, was published. I rattled through thirty-thousand words in three months but quickly realized I was telling the story the wrong way and abandoned it. Then Wahala came out, and the positive reception gave me “the fear,” I became convinced it was a one-off and that I’d forgotten how to write.

Eventually, I knuckled down and went back to basics: What’s the story? Who’s telling it? Why does it matter? I knew I had the bones of a great book I just needed to work out how to tell it. I had a draft in six months, getting 80,000 words down but stopping short of the denouement because the real work begins in the editing, and it was clear there were loads to unpick at the beginning.

My second edit took three months, and by this stage, my story had shape, my characters felt real, and I knew what I was trying to do.

I did two more sets of structural edits with my editors who had brilliant suggestions on tightening the narrative and focusing the scope. And then it was onto line and copy edits. So, all-in-all, about a year to write it (spread over two years) and six months of editing with my editors.

Has your perspective on the publication process changed since your debut was published?

I guess it’s less mysterious now I’ve seen behind the curtain. This time around I had a clear idea of the process and how long everything takes. I’m now used to the s-l-o-w, s-l-o-w, s-l-o-w followed by the Go! Go! Go! rollercoaster that’s the reality of this industry. And I now have author friends who are a huge help and a welcome reality check. I also feel more confident in my voice now, so there’s slightly less pressure.

What was the biggest surprise while getting this book ready for publication?

How personal it is. People say your debut is autobiographical but there is much more of me in This Motherless Land than in Wahala. I didn’t realize how much until I started prepping for live book events and thinking about what to say. When we meet Funke in 1978, she’s living my life in Lagos! She’s in my house, with my parrot and my green Chopper. She goes to my school and my beach Even her mother is inspired by mine. Writers draw on what they know, I guess!

What do you feel you did really well with this novel?

Characters. I’m very proud of Funke and Liv, it took a lot of work to develop them, and I had to dig deep but it was worth it. I’ve created two fully fleshed three-dimensional characters that readers can believe in and root for. They’re flawed (perfection is mind-numbingly dull) but they are real, and I love them. I’m also thrilled that people are calling it page-turning cinematic. Yes, it covers some meaty themes and touches on serious topics like race, culture, and place—but its main aim is to entertain, and I think I delivered that.

Anything you would have done differently?

As always, I’d procrastinate less and trust myself more. I’m brilliant at finding excuses not to write—some days scrubbing the bathroom is more attractive than staring at a keyboard. If I knuckled down and got on with it (and stayed off social media), I’d be on book five by now!

Would you like to share some advice for our readers?

Persevere. Books are big and unwieldy and the only way to get to the end is to keep going. Finish a draft and then go back to the beginning. And repeat. Again, and again— until you’ve got the right story down. Oh, and read. Read in your genre and out of it, read brilliant books to inspire you and awful books to make you feel good about yourself. Just read.

What’s next for you?

I’m working on my next book. Which translates as—I’m back to procrastinating and spending too much time on social media. But I do have a great idea and I’m falling in love with new characters.

Where can our audience find you online?

X: @NikkiOMay
Instagram: @NikkiMayWriter
Website: Nikki-May.com

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The post Breaking Out: Nikki May appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(10 Interviewing Tips for Journalists.)

In my 25 years as a freelance writer, I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing a wide range of people, mostly in the culinary arts, entertainment, and business worlds. Some folks are natural storytellers, and my interviews feel more like conversations that flow steadily and easily. Others feel nervous about being interviewed, or their attention is pulled in a multitude of directions, so it’s my job to make them feel at ease while gathering salient quotes.

But I hadn’t encountered anyone who didn’t think they had anything valuable to say. Not until Peter.

Peter Huey was in his 90s when I interviewed him in 2017. He had immigrated to the U.S. in 1950 from Hong Kong. Along with his nephew, Peter owned and operated Won Kow, the oldest restaurant in Chicago’s Chinatown at the time (it has since closed).

I had interviewed other business owners and community leaders throughout Chinatown for my story on Won Kow, but my interviews with Peter Huey, I hoped, would be the centerpiece. I called him at the restaurant, where he still worked every day, to schedule our first in-person chat. After I offered some possible dates and times, there was a pause on the phone.

“You don’t think you can find anybody better than me, huh?”

I was stunned. Anybody better? In my mind, Peter was indeed a valuable historian. The Chinese-American Museum of Chicago even expressed interest in archiving my interviews with him. Peter had started as a server at Won Kow in 1950 and was still there, nearly 70 years later. No! I wanted to shout. There isn’t anyone better!

I assured him, as best I could, that his experiences were vital to the restaurant’s history, and he reluctantly agreed to meet me at Won Kow the following week.

Our first interview was awkward. Peter deflected every single question about his past, his family, his staff, or his life in China. I have spent over a decade of my life interviewing restaurateurs for features and guidebooks. Most are grateful for the press and are generous with their time. I’ve only had one restaurateur refuse an interview, out of hundreds. I have learned to navigate language and cultural barriers, and maneuver around the harried restaurant life. I am always respectful of their time and try to get in and out as quickly as possible.

Peter was gracious but guarded, and looked nervously around the restaurant while we were talking, as though guilty of something. The wide cultural gap between us felt insurmountable. I was able to get some vital information, but not much detail, so we scheduled a follow-up.

At the next interview, Peter showed up with a Won Kow menu he had found in the building’s basement. It was dated 1928.

“Can you use this in your book?” he asked brightly. I took this as a sign he was becoming more comfortable and persisted with my questions. He still dodged and ducked, but we were headed in the right direction. I asked for another chat the following week.

On our third interview, Peter handed over an entire file of recipe cards he had found in Won Kow’s bar when he bought the building with his brother in 1970. These were original, handwritten recipes for some of the first tiki drinks in Chicago—maybe in America. I took a few photos with my cell, gave the box back to him, urging him to keep it in a safe place, and got my publisher to request written permission to reprint a couple in the book. But I still wasn’t making much progress in getting him to talk about his life, his family, or the history of the neighborhood. I could barely get him to talk about the menu and where he sourced the ingredients, or how his customer base had evolved over the years. He just couldn’t fathom why he was interesting. I felt stuck.

Around the same time, I was taking a course at the Chicago History Museum to discuss Studs Terkel’s book, The Good War. Our teacher was Peter Alter, Director of the Studs Terkel Center for Oral History, so I knew we were in capable hands as we tackled this epic work.

At the end of our first class, which I had taken for fun, Alter assigned homework—an interview with a veteran. I eagerly dove into the assignment, which was well within my comfort zone. I wound up interviewing my niece, and walked away with what I felt was a compelling and fascinating account of her military service during the Iraqi War.

I had hardly glanced at the resources Alter handed out to help us with this assignment—excerpts from Doing Oral History, by Donald A. Ritchie, and Oral History for Texans, by Thomas L. Charlton.

At our next class, Alter reviewed the Charlton handout. Most of it, on interviewing techniques, was Journalism 101 to me: how to use closed questions, open-ended questions, and a balance of both when interviewing subjects. But one interviewing technique, the use of seven different “probes,” caught my attention. Per Charlton, these are “questions and statements that probe what has been said.” Probes are used to persuade a respondent to “reach back in memory for additional, more specific information.”¹

I had been using some of the seven probes on instinct. But the “silent probe” was particularly intriguing. In a nutshell, interviewers using this technique remain silent after a respondent answers a question. This silence sometimes allows the respondent the opportunity to ponder the question more fully, and may continue to talk, unsolicited. I decided to give it a try at what I hoped was my final interview with Peter Huey.

The next time I saw him, we sat at our usual table at Won Kow, in between lunch and dinner service, Peter with his mug of tea, me with a glass of ice water, my cell phone recording audio between us.

I once again asked him more about his history as a restaurateur in Chicago. I sipped at my water and let silence hang in the air after he offered his usual, brief answer. As we sat, I became more acutely aware of the sounds around me; employees were clearing dishes from tables nearby, and the overhead music played ‘80s hits. After about a 30-second pause, Peter started talking spontaneously with a story of his past, instead of his usual stiff answer. I felt a surge of elation.

I tried it again, asking him how Chinatown had evolved in the nearly 70 years he had lived there. Again, he gave a short answer, then elaborated after my silence. Over and over, I let these silent probes do their work, and our conversation continued for over an hour. Though Peter still looked nervously around him from time to time, his body relaxed in the chair. He crossed his legs, leaned back, and folded his arms, sometimes getting lost in his thoughts. He smiled more. I had to stop the recording to save the file and start a new one several times, since I’ve learned—the hard way—to break up long interviews with several recordings in case one file gets damaged or deleted.

Peter wasn’t offering anything I considered juicy or scandalous. It was fairly standard information about anyone’s history. But I respected the fact that it was probably the most personal information he’d ever given to someone outside his community. I considered it an honor.

I thanked Peter for his time, then gathered up my belongings and prepared to leave, somewhat exhausted by our long talk. It was a late winter afternoon and would soon be dark; I wanted to get home before Chicago rush hour traffic hit. Ever the gentleman, Peter stood up, ready to walk me out. I wish I could end this story on that victorious note.

“You aren’t going to use any of that, are you?”

My heart fell into my shoes. I stared hard at the floor, trying to avoid expressing the frustration that flooded my body. Peter looked scared, nervous. He had signed a release that gave me permission to use the images and interviews I gathered. I had every right to use them in my book.

But I didn’t. It became abundantly clear to me that he was conflicted about sharing what I felt were somewhat mundane details about his life. I agreed to only use our earlier interviews, before our breakthrough that long afternoon, out of respect for someone who was in unchartered waters.

I felt deflated as I filed our conversation under “personal.” At least I had grown as a writer by learning to use silent probes for more spontaneous, interesting interviews. I’d have to write my story on Won Kow without what I felt were more interesting details about Peter’s life and Chinatown’s history, and accept the day for what it was—an afternoon with someone whose comfort zone only extended to the dry facts. Someone who revealed himself as a storyteller, if only for a couple of hours, if only for my ears.

___________________________

1. Charlton, Thomas L. 1985. Oral History for Texans, Second Edition. Austin, TX: Texas Historical Commission.

Author’s Note: Peter Huey passed away in 2022, after several decades as a restaurateur.

The post Interviewing People Who Don’t Want to Be Interviewed appeared first on Writer's Digest.

From The Perfect Daughter by D. J. Palmer to the TV show “The Crowded Room,” popular media continues to use DID for its tantalizing plot twists and the unique opportunity it presents to explore the expansive possibilities of identity.

One of Alyssa Cole’s primary goals was to not add to the harmful narratives surrounding DID, a mental illness that impacts an estimated 1 percent of the population according to the National Institutes of Health. And in this interview, Cole discusses her efforts to represent the disorder responsibly.

Cole is a New York Times bestselling author who first made a name for herself in contemporary romance. Her debut thriller, When No One Is Watching, won the 2021 Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Paperback Original and the Strand Critics Award for Best Debut.

WD spoke to Cole about One of Us Knows, which was published by William Morrow in April.

Since the main character has DID, you wrote several characters at once who are both autonomous and deeply connected. What was the most challenging aspect of this?

The most difficult thing for me was really trying to be cognizant of DID as a real diagnosis. There are people who have it. From the beginning, even though it became so deeply important to the story, I didn’t want the story to be about it. I wanted it more to be about a group of people who happened to be a DID system figuring out how they interact and learn to trust each other. I didn’t want it to be a sensational aspect. So often in stories with DID—and this is why I chose Ken as the main protagonist apart from liking prickly heroines—every time you see a movie or read a book or a story about the identity that is not written by someone who has it, it’s always: “Surprise! You have DID!” And then: “Surprise! There’s a secret bad guy who is doing something bad just because they’re a sociopath.”

So, I wanted to subvert that and say, here we have this system. They know they’re a system. They’ve already gone through the “surprise we exist part”—what happens after that navigating and what happens when the main person who is causing trouble is also the one that has to get them out of trouble. Making sure that I was accurate within reason and respectful, but also showing all the messy sides of people who are dealing with mental health issues, outside external factors, a pandemic, a recession, and everything else going on.

What was your research into DID like to portray it in a normative way?

I read lots of memoirs, but first, I tried to come up with a basic story because I didn’t want to read someone’s story and then be like, Oh, let me make a story based on this thing. So, I wanted to have the basic structure of what I wanted to happen and then read more information from first-person sources and see if it was within reason. The basic plot did change as I was researching because some things were, not necessarily bad, but I don’t know if it was my place to write something like that. Then other things were like, Oh, OK, so something like this can happen, and I can then add that to the story without it being something fantastical.

So, I read a lot of memoirs; I read first-person accounts on Reddit and other online sources. I read with the grain of salt because I didn’t know who those people were. There are a significant number of people who [are diagnosed with] DID—I feel like 1 percent of the population is a significant amount—and there are a significant number of people who have it and don’t know it, and then there are people who think they have it. For example, reading Reddit isn’t the same as talking to a psychiatrist or something, but at the same time, people know their brains and what’s going on. I have a lot of things that I would not assume someone could talk about better than me just because they have a degree. And even if the person doesn’t actually have DID, they’re using the same brain as the person who has DID to imagine the situation and what they’re going through. …

But I did have a system I consulted with to make sure I wasn’t putting anything that would be harmful to DID systems in pop culture since there are already so many harmful stories out there. They would read through and generally it was like, “Oh yeah, this is how it can happen, or this happened in our system.”

Some of the more fantastical things I won’t reveal because I don’t want to give spoilers were based on something from my childhood, but I didn’t know if it was crossing a line presenting the idea as something supernatural. I did discuss with the person how best to present this idea of how the ghost plays into the story and the idea of interacting with ghosts and what happens with that when you then have neurological differences and mental health issues and playing around with how real is what’s going on.

Do you have any best practices to share about writing characters who have identity components that you don’t share?

For me, I’m always thinking about how people work and also how not to hurt people. There’s one aspect of how would I feel if someone was writing someone similar to me? What are the things I would not want them to talk about? What is a framing that would be uncomfortable for me? I try to think of it to the best of my ability as someone who is not in someone else’s brain, what could be hurtful to someone?

I also then try to think about what are similarities that I would have with this character? Even if it’s not the same thing, what overlapping experiences do I have that I can draw from to better inform their experience?

So when you’re growing up and there are not a lot of books that have people who are like you, and then you pick up a book and there’s a character who is supposed to be you, my main goal if someone like that picks up one of my books and sees a character like that, I want them to put down the book feeling happy. Even if they have some quibbles with certain things, they feel well-represented and glad that they read the book.

I’m certain some people will not like it and some people will like it, but my main goal is to try, to the best of my ability at the very least, to not be harmful to someone, and at the best, to try to explore their humanity the same way I would want my own explored and not as a trend or a trope or here’s some diversity spice sprinkled onto it. My characters are fictional, but I want them to feel as fully formed and human to someone who has a similar background as I would want to feel reading about someone like myself.

Can you talk about writing characters who are actively deceiving or lying to each other? How do you keep them true to themselves while deciding what hints to give the readers about their true character and their reliability?

For some reason, I really enjoy writing this, and in reality, I hate lying, and I’m super strict about it. I feel like there’s some relation somewhere in my brain between examining all the different ways that people can lie to each other and themselves and also a neurodivergent sense of being able to tell when people are lying and having to figure out: Is this malicious? Do they know they’re lying? Are they lying or are they just hiding something, because that’s not lying?

On some level, I’m subconsciously parsing what is true at all times. Then I really enjoy the dynamic between people [who] are not necessarily maliciously lying. The things I find more interesting are the ways that we lie to ourselves, that we lie to other people to protect ourselves or to protect other people. The ways that people learn to trust one another and [are] learning to trust themselves. I think the lying is also a way to work toward characters discovering how to trust.

I don’t like stories where the lying leads to the character being completely invalidated in their ability to believe in themselves. People lie just to get through the day, even if it’s not malicious.

Talk about trust, then. The main characters are figuring out who to trust in the outer world while learning how to trust themselves.

When I first started writing it, I was thinking of the DID system as a ragtag band of misfits in one body and how they would have to learn to work together, as well as how that dynamic plays out in similar stories or group dynamics, except, in this one, they’re all stuck together. Because they are in one body, I thought it would be a great way to examine both the idea of self and the idea of community and the way that trust is so necessary for the equilibrium with yourself and within a community. With Ken, what does it mean when someone does not trust themselves so much that they can’t see who they are? Even if they’re not necessarily a good person, I wanted it also to be like, is the bad guy always really a bad guy?

There’s conflict happening in the characters’ inner world and outer world at the same time. How do you manage pacing and timing between the two?

Yeah, that was hard. I generally write stories—whether it’s a romance or thriller or sci-fi—whatever mystery is happening, it’s generally burning slowly and then explodes at the end. And with locked-room mysteries, often they’ll get to it right in the beginning and then spend the entire rest of the book exploring it. But because there are two mysteries here—two locked-room mysteries—it was going to have to be different. At the beginning, we’re getting more of the inner world mystery from one point of view and the outer world mystery is more slow burning. Then we get more explosive towards the end.

There is a variant story where both would’ve been happening at the same time, but I felt like it would’ve been too much because there were so many points of view and different things going on.

Also, when I was first thinking of the book, the inner world story was going to be the secondary story, but I was like, the emotional and human connection between the characters was more important to me than the external actions going on. They were still relevant and important to the story, but secondary to what the characters needed to achieve internally.

For writers who like to weave different storylines into the same book, there’s a tension of which one should take the lead. Sometimes this can change the genre of the story. Do you have that conflict, or do you usually know from the beginning which storyline is going to be the most prominent and which genre it will fall into?

I generally know from the beginning. Sometimes I try to add elements that don’t pan out, but then they aren’t necessary to the story. For example, I have a book called A Duke by Default, and it’s a contemporary royalty romance set in Scotland. There’s a secret love child of the Duke, and there is a slight background story of someone trying to buy the real estate in the neighborhood and the neighborhood people are like, “Oh no, what are we going to do?” Part of the reason this guy who hates the monarchy and doesn’t want anything to do with it decides to take on this role is because he can then protect this community. I wanted that gentrification subplot to be bigger, but it was not the story for it. And that gentrification subplot then went on to be applied in a more relevant story where it could be the centerpiece in When No One Is Watching.

For me, I have the story and the characters, and sometimes they have to change the situation, but usually that doesn’t change the genre of the story. It’s more so, this situation is more fitting for something else, so we’re going to have to get rid of that for now or downplay it for now, and then maybe I’ll be able to come back to it later or maybe it just wasn’t meant to be in this one.

Conflict between romantic interests is often used to portray unconscious attraction or attraction that the characters are fighting against. How do you keep this conflict from getting stale or annoying as the book progresses?

Some things that people see as the inciting incident, I see as the resolution because the interesting stuff happens before, and it builds up to all of that instead of immediate violence and dissent. I see conflict as the resolution because I’m a person who, if there’s a conflict in front of me, will address it immediately. So sometimes particular conflict-driven stories don’t work for me because I’m not going through all of that. If there’s a lack of emotional aspects, and it’s external conflict, it’s like, this could be ended in several direct ways. …

The way that I approach conflict is I try to think of the emotional perspective and background of each character and then what is abrasive when they rub against the emotional background and personality and everything else of the characters that they’re around. This can, of course, be a bigger thing if it’s a life-and-death situation. For example, I don’t particularly enjoy “enemies to lovers” stories unless it’s fantasy or historical, but I love “misunderstanding to lovers,” obviously.

In one of my romances, A Prince on Paper, the hero and the heroine have a fake relationship. He is a redheaded step-prince, and she is the cousin of a newly married princess, and throughout the book, he hides behind his playboy façade. And she’s playing a royalty romance otome game [a story-based video game] and romancing him in the game. Throughout the book, she’s getting these phone notifications and, as it goes on, he starts to get more and more jealous because he thinks that she’s talking to another guy. Then at the end, when everything comes to a head, he realizes that she’s playing a game with a fake version of himself. Even though, on the surface, it’s a silly conflict for him, it’s deeply emotional because he is like, “This is the one person who sees me for who I am.” Then he has to wonder, Does she really see me?

There’s another way to tell that story where he gets mad, and he explodes because he’s jealous and thinks she’s cheating. Then when he finds out it’s a game, that conflict is over because that’s the superficial conflict of “I like you and I don’t want you to be with anyone else.” But for this particular couple, I thought it would be more interesting if the idea of she’s cheating on him with a game version of himself, which is the façade that he presents to everyone else, and him having to question if she likes that version of him better. So, I always try to think of the possible straightforward conflict between these two people or between these systems or between this person and this system, and then what is below that conflict that would make it personal for these particular characters. What is the specific thing that would harm them more so than the general conflict of possible cheating or possible misunderstanding?

You often use texts, chat forums, and other written correspondence in your books. Can you talk about that?

So many of us spend a lot of our time texting because our friends are all over the place or we’re busy and not seeing them every day. I just want to see it incorporated more into stories because I feel like it’s realistic. There’s a difference in the way people write and the way people talk to each other, even if the general feeling is the same. It’s just a different way to show interaction and provide a deeper understanding of the characters. What are they writing to themselves in a journal that they’re not telling other people? How do they text as opposed to how do they talk to someone?

Either showing a deeper understanding of a particular character when no one is watching or, to some extent in this book, a deeper understanding of a situation and the ways that the written word, whether it’s a letter or a text or an email, can shift the course of the story or shift your understanding of what’s going on. It can also just be there to provide a deeper understanding of the world.

You watch a lot of anime. Has it taught you anything about portraying emotion or a character’s character?

The biggest thing that it’s done for me is influence how I saw conflict, climax, and resolution in stories. I’ve been watching anime and reading manga since I was very, very young, but I didn’t know the name for the structure that you’ll find in a lot of anime and manga. Recently I found out it’s called kishōtenketsu, and it’s a story without conflict.

It’s a four-act structure, and the third act is usually called the twist. That’s where you learn something that makes you completely reframe everything that you thought you knew, and then you go onto the resolution. The twist doesn’t have to be something explosive. It can be a minor thing that changes how you view everything. Even though I don’t think my writing exactly uses this [structure], it’s been strongly influenced by it and the idea of how little details can change everything.

Do you have any final advice for other writers?

I have taken creative writing classes, and I’ve taught them, as well. But the most important thing is to see those things as a tool that is helping to shape your writing skills and style and not as something your writing style has to conform to.

Often, there’s this idea that you have to take writing classes and learn all of these rules, and I don’t think that’s true. The biggest thing is to read a lot so you can innately understand story structure. This even comes from watching movies and TV and thinking about why it was great and what points did it hit and what aspects of it resonated with you, and then how would you incorporate not the exact thing from the show, but the feeling and the craft into your own work.

You can be writing something and then you can be like, “Oh no, this doesn’t feel right.” You don’t know if it’s because you are missing a certain plot point or a certain story beat if you haven’t studied those things. Education is good, and taking classes is good, but in my opinion, reading is the most important thing. And reading to understand how the book makes you feel at certain points, not just to consume it.

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The post The WD Interview: Alyssa Cole appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Orange’s highly anticipated second novel, Wandering Stars, is out now, and will firmly establish Orange as one of the most talented writers of our time. It begins with Jude Star, a member of the Southern Cheyenne Tribe, remembering his survival of the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 and his subsequent imprisonment at Richard Henry Platt’s prison-castle in Florida, an early precursor to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Gradually it shifts to Star’s son Charles, who is forced to attend the Carlisle school, and follows four additional generations until it meets up with Orvil Red Feather’s story, shortly after the closing events of There There.

Wandering Stars—which could just as easily be read as a standalone novel—therefore serves as both a prequel and sequel to There There, and features the same deceptively simple, lyrical writing style, with Orange’s trademark repetition of words and phrases (e.g. “Such Indian children were made to carry more than they were made to carry” or “He has forgotten that he has forgotten things on purpose”). Orange says this style is “kind of an unconscious thing. I hope it’s not some kind of writerly tic that becomes annoying. … I do like the way you can deepen words through repetition and deepen meaning if you’re using the same words in the same sentence. Something that deepens but can also be playful. I guess I’m trying to defend it and also recuse myself from it at once.”

While he’s writing though, Orange, who is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma and teaches creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, tries to “disappear the voices in the room,” as it were, and instead tries to “focus on sentences and pacing and readability.” Trying to quiet those voices is harder now because he says you “can’t not know that there’s an audience once your book becomes a New York Times bestseller.”

But a large readership wasn’t the audience Orange was initially writing for: “Gertrude Stein has a quote, I don’t know if I’m saying it exactly right, but somebody asks her, ‘What’s your secret to writing?’ And she says, ‘Small audiences.’ With There There, my first reader was my wife. It eventually extended to the small MFA program I was in, where most workshops were four to six people.” With an audience increased by magnitudes, we began our conversation talking about expectations.

Writing the second book is always different than the first because there are expectations involved. How was it different for you?

It was completely different and two years of that being a pandemic was not helpful either, even though everyone had the quote unquote “all the time in the world.” I think the whole sophomore effort thing—the living up to the success, all the new voices in your head when you’re at the page—I think I definitely felt like learning how to do it all over again. I’ve heard that’s already the case with a lot of writers—for each book, you kind of have to learn how to do it again. So, it was definitely challenging, and I had to learn new tools.

With There There, I thought of the premise in a single moment, and I always had as sort of a guiding structural guiding light: Everyone ends up at the powwow. And that’s a very convenient thing when you’re stuck—how does this relate to them getting to the powwow? With this book, I didn’t know. I didn’t know what was going to happen in it and this historical piece was not something that I had planned when I first thought of it. So that also was sort of a monkey wrench. That didn’t come until a year after I started writing it. I was at a museum in Sweden, and I saw this newspaper clipping. I was being given a private tour, and they sort of were awkwardly saying, “We have your people’s stuff. Do you want to see it?” Like, they felt bad that they didn’t know what to do with it yet, because a lot of museums are trying to reckon with the problematic history of museums.

So, this newspaper clipping had Southern Cheyennes in Florida in 1875, and I didn’t know about this piece of history. It turned out to be the origin story of the boarding schools. My tribe was at the origin of the creation of the boarding schools at this prison castle in Florida. So, it went from being a fascination because it had to do with my tribe’s history, to being an integral part of the book, and even informed this generational structure that it now has in its complete form.

It’s so surprising that you didn’t know it was going to have that historical piece until that far along in your drafting process. I was trying to think of another book that serves as both a prequel and a sequel but could also be a standalone novel at the same time. I couldn’t think of one. It was very surprising to me, and I love that you were able to make it do all of those things.

It was certainly hard, really. My editor helped me to shape it, and there were books that I was reading along the way that helped me think of it better. Actually, Oscar Hokeah’s Calling for a Blanket Dance was something that helped convince me, in addition to my editor helping to convince me, to do this linear form where you have this generational piece. That was a really helpful book to read along the way to understand the way a narrative can build an energy by doing a linear thing. Because I often like to do nonlinear, and I was eventually convinced that it worked like this.

Then, the prequel/sequel/standalone piece was also a challenge because there were a lot of drafts where I was repeating myself from There There, or it was too contingent on having the reader have read There There. And I did want it to be its own book.

It does have that large cast of characters just like There There does, and they are all connected in various ways. How did you decide who to include and what perspectives to include?

It started with this character Jude Star. That’s the way the book starts, and it really happened organically from that single family-line source. He ended up having a son. I knew his son was going to end up at Carlisle, and he [Jude] was going to conceive of this idea that he was a part of what made this school that his son ended up getting sent to. I mean, he doesn’t know this in the book, but I proceeded in a really linear way from there. I had his son knowing his friend Victor Bear Shield’s daughter, and then their child being born. So as far as the historical piece goes, it really followed a linear time line. The characters from There There, as it happens in the second half of the book, was a lot more of figuring out who didn’t belong, and how to keep the story with this one family; [it] is a tighter storyline because originally, I had a lot of the characters returning from There There.

Since some of those characters in the present-day part of the story had established voices from the first novel, but there were some new ones in there too, were there any that were more challenging for you to write than others or others that were easier?

During the pandemic, I read all of Toni Morrison, and I had read some of her books before, but I hadn’t read all of her. And there’s something she does with third-person omniscient that is unique to her voice. I had not been interested in third-person omniscient at all. I hadn’t really written anything in that form, and I think I tried to do that in the second half of the book. I don’t think I succeeded. I think the voices end up intruding a lot more than I intended, which I think is fine. I’m happy with where the voices ended up, but that did shape the way that I was thinking of how to convey the characters, so they all have a little bit more of a distance than the third-person close that I was doing more of in There There.

All of these characters, we talked about them being related by way of the generations but even the ones that aren’t part of the family, they’re all interconnected, and they form sort of this web where what one person does sort of tugs and pulls on that web affecting all of the other characters around them. This was true of There There too. What’s your method for keeping track of all these characters and their time lines and actions?

It feels like total chaos. [Laughs] I don’t know that I can give you a method. I can tell you that structuring for me happens on long runs, and in my head is when I have the most clarity about order and how things fit together. I learned that while writing There There. I was just talking to a group of students, and somebody was asking me about structure and keeping track of characters. I had the experience of trying to map it out visually and realized while writing There There that I’m not a visual person at all. When I saw it all visually, when I mapped it all out in Photoshop, it made me feel more confused and like there was more chaos happening. So long runs became the key. It’s something that I already do as part of my writing process, but it also became this key to thinking about structure and how things could make sense together.

Going back to the idea of generations, so much of this book is about the idea of what we inherit, even if we don’t know it’s something inherited, or if we do, we don’t necessarily know where it comes from. The physical example that sticks out to me is the bullet left in Jude Star after the Sand Creek Massacre, and then the bullet piece that’s left in Orvil after he survives the Oakland Powwow shooting. It’s that idea that the past has never really passed, but it’s living inside of us. What did you hope to accomplish, or what was your approach to writing and connecting the past to the present?

I think we’re in a really interesting moment as a country where we’re realizing a lot of things in the past have not been dealt with. So, on one level, I think especially for Native stories, the way the past affects Native people and our relationship to this country and this country’s relationship to itself, has to do with there being things not dealt with to this day that make the past remain present in a really felt way. There’s been a lack of reckoning with the history of our country, the origin of our country, as it relates to Native people.

So that piece, along with on a personal level the way Native people feel history, I think, is different than [how] other people feel it. Part of that has to do with the institutionalized way we talk about American history and the absence of Native people from that teaching and from the conversation. It makes the past felt more than if we did. … For Americans to think of the country or how we did or did not get through the ugliness of genocide and the removal of people and all the different things that have been done, we don’t have any version of that. Instead, we actually just skip over—you hear about the Indians and the pilgrims, and then in institutions, as it’s still taught to this day, you don’t really hear anything. That absence is really felt as much as a bullet that stays in you.

There are a couple of interesting thoughts early in the novel about the idea of books and writing and what stories do or don’t do. One said, “I didn’t think stories were made to comfort. I believed what my father told me. Stories do more than comfort. They take you away and bring you back better made.” How much of your own opinions or ideas about the power of writing and storytelling did you give to your characters?

I think they probably believe it more than I do. I remember when that line occurred to me. This character is talking about a story that his dad told him, about his dad sort of disappearing. On some level, I definitely believe that storytelling and when you get involved with the story—with a good book, with a good movie—at the end of it, you are taken away. You had the experience of disappearing into it, and when you came back, you were different and you were changed. I do believe that fundamentally. But I think that was something that came in a single moment of writing from a character’s perspective, rather than that’s what my belief was, and I wanted to give it to one of my characters. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. What made you want to be a writer?

I realized at some point that there were things that I could access through writing, and through fiction specifically, that were in me that I couldn’t access without writing. I think writing is another form of thinking, and storytelling is not only a way to remember, but a way to create something new that is a part of us. But, through the creation process and the telling of the story, I think it’s part of what keeps me wanting to write—that I don’t know what’s going to come. I don’t know what story’s going to come unless I make space to write and see what comes. That surprise element, the idea that I don’t know what’s there, is what first got me excited about it and also keeps me going. That the writing process has this mystery to it and this aspect of discovery and just bringing together a lot of different elements—memory and emotion—it makes me feel more whole to be involved with the project, to be thinking through something through characters.

It fills not only a restlessness I always felt that I didn’t know what to do with, but also a hole where I need meaning to be, that I think was left by my intensely evangelical Christian upbringing. My dad, he was a Native American Church peyote roadman, and they were both very intensely religious and talked about God a lot. When I first started writing I was really looking for something like a religion to fill a space and fiction ended up being that. I don’t want to sound too crazy to say that. But, I really went at fiction in a way that felt like I was trying to fill that kind of hole. …

What I love about fiction is that it doesn’t pretend to have answers. It poses more questions, and it renders a world where those questions can exist and where the reader can think about them and feel them, but it’s not dogma.

What have you learned about your own writing from teaching others how to do it?

There’s this emphasis that writing teachers give, that I was given, that I find myself giving, about emphasizing “scene” that I don’t always think is right. And sometimes, I’ll default to it because I think that’s what good writing is, and that’s what the reader wants—probably mostly because that’s what the reader wants. We know—I don’t know who the “we” is here—that readers enjoy the illustration of something versus being told some information. There’s a general truth we can all agree on, that scene-based writing is the way that we teach what good writing is.

But I think it can be over-taught. I think the way that I write is from the inside out. So, I’ll know characters’ internal thoughts and tics well before I put them in the world. And a lot of this stuff, as it comes out, is not necessarily something I would ever want to show somebody except certain people I trust and trade pages with.

I’ve learned to know when a scene should be there to anchor the reader and the character to a real world, and when to trust what internality can do, what thinking can do for the reader and, for the character development too. Trying to balance that is something you have to stay conscious of because the default mode is to just put a character into the real world and watch them do stuff and give them a desire, even if it’s a glass of water. I think part of what fiction needs to do is what only fiction can do. We have TV shows and movies that are filled with scenes that are honestly more brilliant than what most writing can do. If we’re only writing scenes, we have TV shows and movies. The interior is what fiction can get at, and I think we need to use fiction to do that as much as we can.

What advice do you have for the readers of Writer’s Digest?

Find a way to make your writing process a discipline in the way that musicians practice their instrument. I think writing has this mystique of like—there’s this binary of inspiration, of being visited by the muse or you have writer’s block, and I think this really detracts from a discipline. So, finding ways to write more, whatever that looks like. It depends on the person. Some people can set a goal of 2,000 words a day, and I probably did that for a year. Or, even just copying beautiful sentences that you admire and feeling how it is to write them isn’t anything new. Other writers have said this but transforming your writing practice into a discipline in the same way that, when you see somebody perform their instrument that they’ve put in the time. Writing requires that.

I don’t think it’s asking of you to be brilliant every time you sit down to write; I think it only asks you to sit down. Occasionally it will ask everything of you if you’re doing it right, and if you’re devoted. That’s sometimes where it’s the hardest, but I think most of the time you just have to be there. So that requires—and this is old writing advice—butt in the seat. But I think part of it is rethinking the way you think about writing. Not as like, Do I have a good idea? Am I interesting? Am I inspired or am I experiencing writer’s block? Instead, How do I put in the time? Trying to reframe it for yourself, because I think we’ve been told that writing is this one thing and it’s been taken outside of the realm of discipline. So, finding ways to convince yourself to be writing as much as you can, as much as time will allow, rather than waiting for the idea or waiting for the inspiration.

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Michael Cunningham writes for an audience, but it’s not the audience you’d expect. The typical piece of writing advice is to “write the book you’d want to read,” but an experience Cunningham had while working at the Boom Boom Room in Laguna Beach between getting his BA and his MFA made him consider what would make his older co-worker Helen pick up a book. A single mom of three trouble-prone children working multiple jobs, Helen was “a huge reader” according to Cunningham. “At the end of every long, hard day, she would get into bed and read for an hour. That’s what she was moving toward …” After recommending she read Crime and Punishment, “as only a pretentious 22-year-old could,” her assessment of the novel (“it was pretty good”) had an impact on Cunningham: “I kind of loved it that no one had told Helen what she was supposed to like better than what she was supposed to like less. … it would be something to write a book that would feel like something to Helen, that would be alive enough and interesting enough and compelling enough to be the book on her nightstand with her pills and her glasses and her Kleenex. That really changed things for me.”

Cunningham still writes for specific people, a select group close to him “who stand in for all people.” He says, “I’m fortunate in having friends who are exactly who I have in mind as readers. And yet they’re nobody’s fool, but neither are they always expecting the worst. They’re generous readers, but also discriminating readers.” The first reader of this small group is Cunningham’s husband of 37 years, Ken Corbett. “He is a fantastic reader, a fantastic editor, and is able to be entirely frank with me, because he takes me that seriously. I know he’s not backing away from anything in order to spare my feelings. I like having my feelings spared, but this is too important.” Writing books that he believes certain people in his life would want to read “translates as much as anything into striving for a certain vividness.”

And Cunningham’s novels live up to this goal. Whether he’s tackling the AIDS epidemic in his early work, as he did in A Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood; exploring the lives of three women connected by the novel Mrs. Dalloway in The Hours, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999; or detailing a marriage on the brink of collapse (By Nightfall), his writing brings to life all of the hope, wonder, and heartbreak of the human condition through the relatable, yet intense experiences of his characters.

Now, with Day, his newest novel, he does the same. On April 5, 2019, Dan and Isabel’s marriage is on rocky ground, their children Nathan and Violet grapple with the challenges of childhood, and Isabel’s brother Robbie, who lives with them, needs to get over his most recent boyfriend while looking for his own place to live. A year later, on April 5, 2020, readers see the family in the earliest days of the COVID-19 lockdown with Robbie stranded in Iceland. Finally, on April 5, 2021, when the effects of the previous year have brought their lives to a breaking point, readers see the fractures that a global crisis can cause, in the way only Cunningham can craft. We began our conversation with his inspiration for the novel.

What was the inspiration for Day and when did you start working on it?

I was about a third of the way through another novel entirely, a big, long, multi-generational, I won’t call it a saga, but you know what I mean. There came the pandemic, and I felt like there was no real way to work the pandemic into the book I had started. It felt both important and nearly impossible to write somehow about the pandemic. Nearly impossible in that, how do you write a novel, write anything that takes the pandemic into account, without being a book about the pandemic? How do you keep it from overwhelming the novel in more or less the way it overwhelmed the world? I was really stumped for a while, but I just couldn’t go on with the novel I’d started. I couldn’t think of where to go from there.

I don’t always know where any novel comes from. It seems to sort of burble up somehow, and plenty of never-to-be-written novels burble up, are examined, and then sort of burbled back down. So, I always wait and live with the idea for a while. The idea being: What if we were to see a group of people through the pandemic from before to after, which is a little unusual for me. I don’t usually start with a relatively abstract notion like that. It’s more like: two best friends in high school, one’s gay, one’s straight, an answer grows out of that. Or in the case of The Hours, it was originally going to be a gay version of Mrs. Dalloway, which burbled out and was a really bad idea, but then it evolved into something else.

So anyway, it’s a long answer to a simple question. This novel was unusual for me in that it started with an ambition on my part to write the novel that neither belittled the pandemic nor was overwhelmed by it. And then one thing leads to another.

That’s interesting because I was rereading your earlier work, and I was thinking about how you included the AIDS epidemic as it was happening, and this novel does that with COVID. I wonder, just generally speaking, what are the challenges with writing about events that are current and still unfolding?

Fate is much too fancy a word for any person to apply to themselves, but I have, as a writer, so far survived, not one, but two pandemics. And it’s not over yet! So, knock wood, right? But I think all writers who are roughly my contemporaries, which is almost all living writers—or certainly people past a certain age—those of us who were in not one, but two of them … I don’t know if that makes us writers of the plague generation, but it is somewhat unusual historically speaking to find most of your writing career dominated by two catastrophic events in the form of communicable diseases. Go ahead, see what you can do with those two!

My first, A Home at the End of the World, was difficult in that I was writing it as the AIDS epidemic was raging around me. I was working in the mornings, then volunteering with GMHC and then with ACT UP in the afternoons. This is not so much about art as it is about the atmosphere in which you’re trying to produce something that resembles art.

The nature of the AIDS epidemic kept changing. I started A Home at the End of the World when there were no tests for HIV, and I finished it before there was effective medication—“Oh, there are tests for it. Oh, this is how we get it.”—and I had to keep revising that book as I went along to just keep up with the events as they unfolded.

With this one, well, let’s just say we all hope that the worst of the pandemic is behind us. If that proves to be untrue, it’s still a little bottle rocket from the years 2019 to 2021.

So many of your books have specific timeframes … Do you plot them out and know this timeframe in advance? Or are you more of a write, explore, and work it out in revision writer?

Very much the latter. I start with an idea or a scene or, well—I can’t imagine anyone simply writing a sentence and then writing another sentence without any sense of what kind of book you’re writing, or where it’s headed. But I keep that a little bit vague in my own mind because I know amazing writers who plot it all out in advance and stick to the plot. I, however, find, like a lot of my sister and brother writers, that if I know where a novel is headed, the characters tend to become employees of the story, whose job it is to convey it to its destination. Every book turns out to be something other than what I had expected it to be when I started writing. Again, Day is a little unusual for me in that the structure came early, and I saw no reason to break up the structure, though within that format there were endless possibilities.

It’s a great question, and I’m glad you brought up “time” because I teach. I was just in class yesterday, and I talk to my students two days a week about narrative and how it works and what it’s for. We were just talking about how certainly fiction, as opposed to poetry, is anchored to time. It would be hard to name a novel—there’s always some novel that defies whatever category you try to put novels into—but I think it is pretty safe to say that 99 out of 100 novels are subvertly about the passage of time and what happens over time. A poem doesn’t have to do that. You could pick just about any book on the bookshelf behind me or any book on the bookshelf behind you and give it to somebody and say, “I hope you like this—it’s about the passage of time.” That’s sort of fundamental. It doesn’t mean chronology. It doesn’t mean sequence, but it can only be read sentence by sentence.

So yeah, I probably do know fairly early on about the time span I’m looking at, and really ever since Mrs. Dalloway, I seem to have been focusing on naturally, follow your instincts, smaller increments of time. Even Specimen Days, the book after The Hours, is three distinct time periods, albeit set in different places, in different genres.

One of the things about surviving to a certain age and having written a certain number of books is, at a certain point, you begin to see patterns that were invisible to you as you were writing because you were just writing the best book you could. And you don’t think of yourself—I don’t think of myself—as any kind of writer in particular, but when you look back … you have inclinations, you have a fingerprint, there are ways your mind works that are not something you’re really aware of until you begin to see a smallish pile of books and see that they all have something in common.

Yes, so many of your stories are explorations of family and creating the family that you need and the different ways that love shows up in those families. There’s a great quote in Day where Isabel and her co-worker Derrick are looking at some photographs, and he says, “This is a story about extending the boundaries of family.” I thought that encapsulates your novels. What fascinates you about that topic of family and how it shows up?

I think families are inherently interesting, but so are a lot of human and other phenomena. My particular interest and attraction to the unconventional family, probably, was driven into me by surviving the AIDS epidemic during which untold numbers of people, of course, died. Among those numbers, there were a lot of people—gay men—who called their parents and said, “I have two things to tell you: I’m gay, and I have AIDS.” Often, their parents rallied. More often than you would think, they hung up the phone, and we formed kamikaze families.

The person who was mortally ill, we were already friends, but suddenly there was a whole other kind of crunch on. We did for each other the kinds of things that many of us had grown up being told only your family will do. When the shit hits the fan, there’s only one porch light that’s on, there’s only one body of people who are going to sit by the bedside and make the funeral arrangements. And guess what? That role can be equally filled by a disco bunny, a motorcycle dyke, and a drag queen. As I saw that happening over and over again, then the disco bunny would get sick, and the drag queen, and that had a real effect.

I felt that I don’t want to romanticize the unorthodox or queer family, and I hope I haven’t in any of my books. It’s been really important to me to not hold out a family comprised of a disco bunny, a drag queen, and a motorcycle dyke—it’s not like your troubles are over if your biological family is out of the picture. But I wanted to, and this seemed more urgent 30 years … I wanted to acknowledge those families. I didn’t want them to be pushed to the side or underestimated. And then it’s how many novels later? It still stays with me.

There are some beautiful descriptions in Day. There’s a scene where Violet is waiting for the little white dog to come to the park, then toward the end of the book, a character describes a feeling of queasiness that’s not love, but may or may not not be love. The way those are written is so specific and real that they evoke something unique to those characters, yet we can all identify with them. I wonder about how you craft these sentences. I would love to think that over time it would get easier to write that way, but I also imagine there’s a lot of time and revision that goes into it.

Over time, it gets a little easier if only in that over time you have a little more confidence than you did. Over time, you come to feel like the appellation writer is one that actually does apply to you because early on you just feel like a huckster, which can last through the first couple of novels. So yeah, a little less of a sense that I am skating out onto very thin ice, and it’s helpful to feel like almost literally you have the right to do this.

It’s something I talk to my students about. At our first meeting—I teach a literature class and an advanced writing class—and I asked them a number of questions. The one that really freaks them out is What do you think you’re good at as a writer? They’re perfectly willing to talk about all their shortcomings. I say, “OK, you’re going to need this: Let’s talk about what you’re good at.” And it’s really interesting to see them struggle that way.

Which is a long way of saying that I guess you could say I’m no less frustrated by any given days’ work, but I’m less fearful than I used to be. …

When I was at the [Iowa] Writers’ Workshop many years ago I had one great teacher, a writer named Hilma Wolitzer, mother of Meg Wolitzer, also a fantastic writer. Hilma took me aside about midway through the semester and said, just to me, not to the other students, “Here’s what I want you to do: I want you to, when you’re finished with a draft of the story, go through it and grade every line either A, or—let’s say there’s no Cs—the really great ones get As, the perfectly OK ones get Bs. Then I want you to go back and rewrite all the A sentences because those are the ones about your precocity. Those are the ones in which you are doing triple flips in the run-up to the Olympics, and they’re not in service to the story.”

So, any novel of mine, certainly any paragraph, most paragraphs, has shed a skin of overwriting that you don’t see, that no one sees but me.

That’s entirely counter to what I would’ve expected. I would assume that you would want to improve the B sentences, but what you’re saying makes so much sense.

Right, and this was, again, specifically advice for me and with my penchant, even that young, to write overly elaborate, overly lyrical. Why just one simile when you could have three? And I’m still looking at those A sentences. …

So, when you have that conversation with your students and you ask them to identify what they’re good at as a writer, presumably they want to know your answer to that question.

Oh, I do answer. I don’t ask them to discuss painful topics that I’m somehow spared from. I think this is something like, I write a really good sentence, and I feel like I see very clearly. I offer them that. I usually do not tell them, at least not early on, the A sentence versus B sentence thing, because they’re students, and it’s hard to convince them that I’m not speaking to everyone … We may trot that one out later. I try to steer them away from using the word weakness. Like, what are your challenges or whatever, which is kind of bullshit, but I also don’t want them to say weakness. …

Going back to Day for a minute, I reread The Snow Queen, and it struck me that Tyler is very attuned to the political happenings of the time, the elections of 2004 and 2008. I think in Day it would’ve been easy, and maybe obvious, to include the politics of 2020 and what became the politics of COVID-19. But there was none of that. Was this an intentional choice?

For one thing, I think the pandemic was enough, because of course the pandemic followed close on the heels of the 2016 elections, and I guess this is where you kind of cut your conscience to suit your situation. I’ve generally felt that a lot of American fiction, even the stuff I really admire, it takes place in a slightly weirdly apolitical world, as if it didn’t really matter who was running the country, who was running the corporations. It’s hard to imagine a South American writer or an African writer writing about people as if they were unaffected by class and politics and consumerism or whatever.

But for Day, I felt like not only was the pandemic more than enough to take on, but on the one hand, I don’t want the novels I write and novels I read, to just ignore culture and politics. On the other hand, you want a novel to be both specific to its time and to make sense beyond its time, and I feel like, the politics when I was writing Day—which is true right now—I have no idea what it’s going to be like in a year or two years. And I thought, These people have trouble enough with what they’re doing.

What advice do you have for readers of Writer’s Digest?

Don’t panic.

To be more specific, in my experience, what undoes writers more than any other factor is they give up too soon. Going both to undergraduate and then the MFA program, I knew, in both places, really gifted writers who simply came to their senses and stopped and did something else. It’s sort of by attrition, like “I’m sick of being a bartender, I’m going to get a real job, and I’ll write it on the weekends. I’ll have children and I can write when they’re taking naps.” Believe me, I’m not saying don’t have children or don’t do an interesting job. But what I do know, there’s so many of us early on, it’s a question of knocking at the door and knocking at the door and knocking at the door and just, “Fuck, will you stop knocking? All right!”

I had a story in The New Yorker, a chapter from A Home at the End of the World, and it got a lot of attention, but that was after almost 10 years of sending stories to The New Yorker and other places. … So, don’t panic.

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1. What was your inspiration?

Inspiration is the creative spark that leads to great things, the “aha!” moment when the abstract suddenly takes form. It strikes writers, musicians, researchers, and more—anyone striving to create, build, or innovate. Almost every important accomplishment has started with a moment of inspiration, and it behooves writers to explore that aspect of a story.

As a general freelancer, my work requires that I talk to people in all walks of life, from astronauts and artists to cancer researchers and filmmakers. Almost always, there is an important moment of inspiration in these people’s stories, and I’m eager to explore it. For example, I recently interviewed renowned paleo artist William Stout for Back Issue! magazine regarding his extensive dinosaur-themed comic book work. His covers are very action-oriented, and I asked about the inspiration behind two of them for a series titled Cadillacs and Dinosaurs. Both covers, Stout said, were inspired by incidents that occurred while he was visiting Antarctica studying and drawing the local wildlife. In one instance, he and a colleague almost died when their Kodiak boat nearly overturned in the icy water. The other was inspired when a scientist in Stout’s group was knocked to the ground by an aggressive bird called a skua. In addition to being great stories, these anecdotes illustrate how inspiration can come from the strangest places, and how successful creators use it to their advantage.

The best way to approach the topic of inspiration with a source is be direct and specific. “What was your inspiration for X?” “Where did the idea for Y come from?” “What commonly inspires the work you do?” Sometimes the response will be mere background, but often it sheds important light on why or how a certain thing happened.

2. Why is this important?

Someone who has accomplished something remarkable inherently understands why that accomplishment is important. You may, too, but your readers may not, especially if the topic is novel to them. It’s up to you as the writer to encourage your source to explain the importance so the reader understands just how life-changing it promises to be.

I write often about health and medicine, and I always ask why a particular breakthrough is important. Sometimes it’s readily apparent: a novel treatment for cancer, for example, is important because it will save thousands of lives. But other times the importance needs to be clarified in a way that says to the reader, “Pay attention—this breakthrough may have important implications for your own life.”

Asking why something is important may sometimes seem unnecessary, but it’s still a good idea to have your source explain that importance because their answer may provide additional information or reveal deeper insight. 

3. What were the greatest challenges you faced, and how did you overcome them?

Everyone loves a triumph-over-adversity story, so asking sources how they dealt with overwhelming challenges in pursuit of success can often form the heart of an article or profile, and even become its through-line.

What were the greatest challenges you faced, when did you recognize them, and how did you overcome them? This line of questioning can reveal a source’s intent, the extent of their drive, and how they think through obstacles, which in turn helps illuminate the importance of their achievement.

Challenges can take many forms, such as time constraints, a lack of necessary materials or funding, or gaps in knowledge that must be bridged. Challenges became the primary focus of a feature I wrote for Veterinary Practice News regarding the San Diego Zoo’s involvement in an international effort to save the nearly extinct northern white rhinoceros, of which only two remain in the world. Understandably, the challenges faced by participating veterinarians and others are extensive, ranging from perfecting ovum pickup (the retrieval of unfertilized eggs, a skill possessed by only a handful of people worldwide) to converting cryogenically preserved cells from northern white rhinos into stem cells that could develop into sperm and eggs. These and other challenges drove my article, fueled by the effort’s desperate race against time.

4. What do you get personally from your work?

I love this question because it addresses the issues of motivation and reward: Why are you engaged in this effort, and what joy do you derive from it? Unfortunately, many writers gloss over this question, if they raise it all, because they don’t think it’s particularly important or will add to the article they’re writing. But I have found that asking what someone gets personally from their work can evoke emotions that take the conversation, and sometimes the resulting article, in unanticipated directions and reveal unique insights.

I ask this question often, regardless of a source’s occupation, and almost always find their answer quotable. Some love the challenges their work provides. Others do it simply for the fun of it, which is fine. But altruism—the satisfaction of knowing their work helps others—is one of the most common responses I hear. Kwane Stewart, who I profiled for Veterinary Practice News, is a good example. The California-based veterinarian created an outreach program that provides free veterinary services to unhoused pet owners. This mission, he told me, stemmed from an encounter he had with a homeless man whose dog had such a severe flea problem that it looked like a burn victim. Stewart treated the dog for free, and the results were nothing short of miraculous. “I felt the man’s despair [when we first met], and I then pulled his dog out of a state of suffering,” Stewart recalled. “It was such a healing moment for me.” These kinds of evocative, emotionally charged quotes are writing gold, but you have to seek them out.

5. Who else would you suggest I talk to?

Beginning writers often start a project with a set list of sources, and hold firm to that list. This can severely limit an article’s scope, perspective and depth of opinion, insight and information. Early in my career, I learned to conclude every interview by asking the source who else they thought I should talk to. Almost always, they would suggest colleagues whose knowledge and insight added to the topic I was writing about. When reaching out to Dr. B, I would let them know that I had already talked to Dr. A, who had made the referral. With this recommendation, Dr. B would almost always agree to a chat.

By asking sources who else they would suggest you talk to, you’re opening yourself to unanticipated opportunities that can help improve your work. Professionals, regardless of occupation, are almost always aware of the true innovators in their field and the importance of their work. As a result, they may recommend subject matter experts you had no knowledge of, and areas of research that help give your article additional depth.

Not every referral will be useful. Some may be individuals you have already talked to, while others may not be directly involved in the subject you’re writing about. But the question is always worth asking because when a referred source has additional information or insight to share, your readers will benefit.

Click to continue. 

The post The 5 Questions You Should Ask During (Almost) Every Interview appeared first on Writer's Digest.

So, what exactly is a Q&A article and why are they popular with both readers and writers?

The Q&A (question and answer) article is an edited transcription of an interview with a simple narrative introduction. It involves interviewing only one source, making the process much smoother and less time consuming than having to coordinate multiple interviews. Since the focus is on the interviewee, readers can enjoy their story unencumbered by news angles, interjections, or any inference that can sometimes sneak into reported articles and features.

The interviewee can be a person with amazing accomplishments or a fascinating career. They can be a famous author, actor, director, or artist. While they don’t necessarily have to be well known, they must be compelling.

A great Q&A requires thorough research. Your subject must have something interesting to say and the ability to say it well. Your finished piece should be simple, well structured, straightforward, and enjoyable to read.

Here are seven tips on how to write a Q&A readers will love.

1. Choose an interesting subject/interviewee

Ask yourself who you would like to read about in a magazine or online publication? For the best results you need to find someone with an interesting story and/or unique viewpoint. You also need to ensure that they’re good talkers, and the only way to do this is to find and read any previous articles or simply call them and chat. After a few minutes on the phone, you’ll know if they’re talkative enough to warrant a full Q&A.

2. Do your research

To extract interesting answers an experienced interviewer knows what questions to ask and how to ask them. This is a skill we must all develop and hone as journalists in general, but for a Q&A it’s imperative.

Thoroughly research your interviewee so you can ask questions that generate compelling answers. If you only get monosyllabic responses, then you have no article. You must delve into your subject’s life and background and find any interesting facts and scenarios. Make sure you ask some basic questions first, but don’t repeat obvious questions that have already been answered in other interviews (if you find any). Try thinking far outside the box and come up with fresh ideas. Put yourself in their position—what would you like to talk about if someone asked you for an interview?

Have a list of questions ready at the interview, but you don’t necessarily have to use them all. This is just your guide, and it can help to get the conversation flowing. Be sure to ask follow-up questions as they arise. This is often when you discover the gems, the scoops. Maybe you’ll stumble upon something they haven’t spoken about before. Your resulting piece will then stand out from any other articles that may be circulating.

3. Record the interview

How will you conduct the interview? You can either interview the person over the phone, in person, or through a video meeting app like Zoom. Just remember to record the interview as you won’t have time to scribble enough notes and probably won’t have the opportunity for a re-do. 

Make sure your recording device is working beforehand by calling a friend or partner. There are many apps available. I’ve used Tape a Call, my MacBook voice memos, and a handheld digital voice recorder. When conducting an in-person interview try to meet in a quiet space with little to no background noise. 

There’s nothing worse than straining to decipher what someone is saying when your main goal is accuracy and authenticity. It also takes longer and ends up being frustrating. This is supposed to be straightforward and fun, remember!

4. Be conversational

This is a conversation not an interrogation, so make sure to keep it light. This isn’t hard news or an investigative piece. For this type of article, you want your interviewee to relax, open up, and feel comfortable talking about themselves. Your research should have prepped you for the type of questions to ask, but easygoing conversations can go anywhere. Have fun with this. 

You’re chatting with a unique individual. These moments are precious, and we’re extremely privileged as writers and journalists to have the opportunity to talk with some of the most interesting people in the world. And it’s perfectly fine to ask your interviewee at the end if she wants to add something or if you’ve missed anything important that they’d like to mention.

5. Transcribe your own interviews to get the best results

This is a personal choice. Transcribing long interviews is nobody’s idea of a fun time, and many writers are comfortable using a transcription service. But I prefer transcribing my own interviews as it’s an opportunity to hear the conversation from a different perspective and I may spot something interesting and pertinent that would be lost or missed if I used a service. While tapping away I automatically edit (by putting big stars and exclamation points by the stuff I like) so by the end of the process, I have the best answers figured out and the piece is almost formatted.

I would also suggest listening to the interview again after transcribing, maybe while doing household chores like folding clothes or ironing (does anyone even iron anymore?). This way you’re hearing the conversation from yet another perspective—the listener. Imagine if this was an NPR interview, what would you include or omit? Have a notebook and pen ready, just be sure to carefully place the iron down first. You might capture some aha moments while starching that crisp white button-down shirt.

6. Edit for length, flow, and clarity

By now, you should be quite the authority on the interviewee and their story and therefore it will be easier to pick and choose which questions and answers to use in your piece.

Edit and structure them in a way that flows. They don’t have to be in sequential or chronological order, it just needs to read well and make sense. Trim down your questions (it’s not about you) and edit out all the excess fluff in the answers, including all the inevitable ums and ahs.

7. Write a catchy introduction

Your introduction or lead should be short, to the point and compelling enough to draw the reader in so they’ll read the whole article. Since you know your subject very well by now, you can easily find some unique angle with which to propel your piece.

For example, here’s the lead of a Q&A I wrote for Videoscope Magazine:

He’s a 6’ 4” South Carolina native who went from playing football for the Clemson Tigers to becoming a famous actor in China. Fluent in Mandarin, he’s the first non-Asian to study at the Beijing Film Academy. He landed a starring role in the $100 million fantasy adventure film Asura, billed as the next Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And his vision is to bridge the gap between the American and Chinese film industries. Now based in L.A., he’s tackling Hollywood. Meet Matthew Knowles, one of the most interesting men in the business.

The trick is to say a lot in a short paragraph. My subject here, Matthew Knowles was a perfect candidate for a Q&A since he has such a unique and fascinating story.

Just one more…

Article Format

Questions and answers need to be clearly differentiated and the format and length of the piece is usually determined by the publication you’re writing for. It can range from using the names of the interviewer and the interviewee (starting off with their full names and then using just initials) to using the letters Q and A in boldface. Or you can boldface the questions and use italics for the answers.

If writing on your own platform, maybe on a site like Medium or your own blog, you can choose from any of these different formats. Just make sure you keep it consistent throughout the piece.

Good luck with your projects and we look forward to reading some great Q&As soon.  

The post How to Write a Q&A Style Article Readers Will Love appeared first on Writer's Digest.