Whatever your medium, if you interview people for your stories, there’s probably something here for you. These excerpts from our conversation have been edited for clarity and structure.

Some craft tips for pulling narrative from daily news Q-and-A’s:

I tell them ahead of time what I might want. If we’re on deadline, and the person we’re going to be talking to is what we call a kind of “normal person,” maybe part of a couple in Dublin who is talking to us about how the seismic financial cuts are affecting them personally, they may be reluctant, they may be shy, they may be reticent to reveal too much. If I say, “What I’d like to leave the audience with is an idea of what your life is like right now,” then they will start telling me the information I need in the form of a story.

Then I become the person who teases them along and directs them in terms of questions, who fleshes it out. They become much more relaxed, so they’re going to make it more of a narrative. They’re not on edge, thinking that I’m going to ask them a question they can’t answer or that’s beyond them. They know that what I want is just a personal tale. It’s much easier to elicit from somebody when you give them a heads up that it’s not a gotcha interview.

On the other hand, if it is a gotcha interview, if it’s a government representative, or the foreign minister of Finland, or a State Department official, you can still have a narrative, and you can plan for the narrative, but it’s easiest in the execution when you can get the subject disarmed enough to just have a conversation. Sometimes that means interrupting a bit. Sometimes that means saying, “Hold on, I want to ask you about that in a few minutes, but let’s get back to this other point.”

Then people will speak more naturally to you. They’re not going to talk sound bites. You have a conversation where you can take yourself out or leave yourself in, but the idea is to get them on the bicycle with you and pedaling. And then, even if there are significant challenges, or even if you take a little side route, you can easily come back, because they understand the thrust. You can intentionally move someone off to the side and then move them back in when you’re engaging them more easily.

In terms of a long or more documentary-style interview:

Again, sometimes I give people a heads up on what I want to get out of it. Usually I’ll speak to them off the top of my head, so they can get an idea of the natural cadence in my own voice as I’m talking to them. We like to have our introductions written ahead of time, something like: “OK, we’re rolling tape in three, two, one:  I’m Lisa Mullins. This is ‘The World.’ In Uruguay a group of high school students has been learning a lesson in finance…”

With that kind of intro, suddenly things become arch and uncomfortable. I want to have set the tone prior to that, so that someone knows my regular conversational style, and they’ll get in sync with me as soon as I ask the first question. I’d like to keep that conversational tone going. That’s how you get the narrative; that’s how you get someone to start from the beginning, to tell you the story, and not just give you what they expect you want to know.

When they’ve practiced or repeated so much of what they have to say that they’re speaking on automatic pilot, that detracts from the interview. When I can get them speaking in terms of chronology, in terms of a thought process, in terms of watching a story unfold and then maybe bringing it back to the beginning, that’s when the audience is naturally going to listen. People have an ear for storytelling, and everybody wants to hear a good story.

I find Q-and-A’s incredibly intriguing, written Q-and-A, because they’re easy to follow. There’s a logic to them. I’d say the same thing for Q-and-A’s that you hear on the radio, even more so, I think, than on television. You get nuance, you get meaning in silence, in pauses and sighs, in tension. You can hear conflict when there’s nothing on the air.

If there’s a sense of conflict in the interview, very often listeners will listen even more carefully, and they’re surprised there might be a resolution at the end. “Gee, the person was taken aback,” or “Maybe someone was drawing the wrong conclusions.” And “Hey, at the end, it wasn’t as bad as all that.”

So, look! You were transported somewhere. There was a different end to the story from what was expected, based on not just what was said but what wasn’t said, where the silent irritation was, where the withdrawing was on both sides. I think that’s as much a part of the narrative of the story as anything.

Ideally, I would love to have listeners come into an interview and feel intrigued, maybe projecting where they think the interview might go. And then at the end not even being aware of how much time has elapsed, thinking, “Wow. Where did I just land?” That usually happens when you’ve taken them on a mini narrative journey.

Generally speaking:

I want the producer to find everything that he or she possibly can about the subject that we’re going to be talking about. I read as much as I can and have time for, but if the interview is bearing down on me, I just start a mind purge and write down questions immediately with the ones that are most obvious to me. Those are the ones our listeners will probably be most interested in.  I will type out several questions of my own. I get everything in front of me, and sometimes don’t even look down again after the first question. I do like to have a solid launching point for the first question, though, and I try to figure out where I want to go.

How many angles are too many angles? When is this going to be watered down because I’m putting too many hats on this person? The job for me is to contain information and to keep it on a straight road, almost putting blinders on. You remain open to any slight turn or twist, but you have to be as disciplined as possible to know when you’re letting yourself go too far in one direction or letting the interviewee go too far, for a bunch of reasons:

One, it doesn’t serve the audience. Everything’s being diluted if you don’t have the trajectory. Two, my producer is going to kill me, because the piece is going to be cut down to 4 1/2 minutes regardless of how long we record. Also, because I want to have a story, a nugget, from that person that people will listen to.

If I’m disciplined, and they kind of know what I want, then they’re not flailing around. A lot of the fear in interviews happens when the interviewee doesn’t know if he or she is giving you want you want, and there’s a lot of meandering and uncertainty. Even the most kind of squidgy seemingly open-ended interview really has to have a certain amount of discipline around it to be successful. It’s a lot harder than doing a “What did the White House say today?” interview.

Narrative doesn’t mean arduous planning necessarily. Narrative means having your path cut out for you, but not necessarily knowing where exactly it will take you, just that you want a place to touch down. By the way, that end point may lead you to infinity – to more tension or some nonresolution. Everything doesn’t have to be tied up in a bow, but I want us to be able to land somewhere at the end.

Insane Clown Posse

Whether they use full-on storytelling or just crib a few literary devices, interviews have their own narrative arcs and angles. From political drama (think the Frost-Nixon standoff or “The Fog of War”) to Studs Terkel’s cultural layering, interviews create a kind of permanent present-tense experience for viewers.

Two recent magazine interviews underline the narrative potential of the form. The first, “Insane Clown Posse: And God created controversy,” runs through a dizzying talk with the rap duo on The Guardian’s website.

The conversation jumps off with the acknowledgement that despite their ultra-violent lyrics, the pair are evangelical Christians. Reporter Jon Ronson moves on to reveal that the performers suffer from depression. As the story unfolds, even those who contest the importance of hate-spewing clowns may find the interview compelling, funny and disturbing, and perhaps not in predictable ways. Here’s an excerpt of Ronson’s dialogue:

Violent J shakes his head sorrowfully. “Who looks at the stars at night and says, ‘Oh, those are gaseous forms of plutonium’?” he says. “No! You look at the stars and you think, ‘Those are beautiful.’ ”

Suddenly he glances at me. The woman in the video is bespectacled and nerdy. I am bespectacled and nerdy. Might I have a similar motive?

“I don’t know how magnets work,” I say, to put him at his ease.

“Nobody does, man!” he replies, relieved. “Magnetic force, man. What else is similar to that on this Earth? Nothing! Magnetic force is fascinating to us. It’s right there, in your f**king face. You can feel them pulling. You can’t see it. You can’t smell it. You can’t touch it. But there’s a f**king force there. That’s cool!”

Shaggy says the idea for the lyrics came when one of the ICP road crew brought some magnets into the recording studio one day and they spent ages playing with them in wonderment.

“Gravity’s cool,” Violent J says, “but not as cool as magnets.”

The struggle between interviewer John H. Richardson and actor Christian Bale in Esquire’s December issue is more convoluted. As Richardson attempts to build a narrative that illuminates Bale as a person, the temperamental actor throws up roadblocks, refuses to participate, and ends with an insult to his interviewer’s efforts to reveal anything at all about him.

The narrative builds and destroys itself, eventually piling up a kind of story:

BALE: Why are you questioning those things?

ESQUIRE: Just curious.

BALE: Why are you putting all that muddle in your brain that’s not needed to be there?

ESQUIRE: I guess you just look at the choices people make and wonder, What’s up with that?

BALE: But why are you worrying so much about everybody else? Let’s start looking at you for a minute, all right?

A standoff ensues not unlike the scene in Antonioni’s The Passenger when Jack Nicholson is interviewing a witch doctor who clearly thinks he’s an obnoxious idiot. “Your questions are much more revealing about yourself than my answers will be about me,” the witch doctor says, turning the camera around so it’s pointing at Nicholson. Major existential moment as Nicholson stares into the abyss between sign and signifier. But we have seen this movie, and it does not turn out well — the spell must be reversed.

BALE: It should just happen. It should just happen. If something’s true and sincere, it happens regardless of marketing. The more I talk about it, the more I’m telling people how they should react. And that is an asshole.

ESQUIRE: Not to argue, but that’s not really true.

BALE: Are you calling me a liar? Am I lying?

ESQUIRE: Sometimes the ground needs to be prepared. And you’ve laid down these onerous rules on me — all I can do is a Q&A.

Actually, these are forbidden words that you are reading right now. Bale is in the habit of requesting that his media interviews be printed in a Q&A format. He also prefers to conduct them at the same five-star luxury hotel in Los Angeles, and makes it known that he dislikes personal questions.

Both these interviews end up far afield from straight transcription. The interviewer’s after-the-fact insertion of connective tissue between segments of the Q-and-A shape the story arc and set the tone.

Very long long-form

“Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of a Hedge Fund Manager” a book-length series of interviews, falls into an even longer-form category. Keith Gessen, editor of the political and cultural journal n+1, conducted a series of interviews in which a financial player chronicled the economic collapse and its aftermath.

In a phone conversation last month, Gessen described how in small and large ways, events in “Diary” began to take a narrative turn – not just in chronicling the meltdown but in the hedge fund manager’s outlook and life. Asked to what degree he imagined the book as narrative during the interview process, Gessen said,

I was very much thinking of it in terms of Studs Terkel, and there’s another book that I read some years ago, an updating of Studs Terkel called “Gig.” That book is amazing. These people have these crazy jobs, and as they talk about them, details of their lives emerge.

With “Diary of a Very Bad Year,” initially, I just wanted to find out what was going on with the financial crisis. I knew I didn’t know what was going on, and I had this sort of acquaintance who I thought could explain it. After I did the first interview and transcribed it, I was surprised. It had a lot of information. He had a very charming way of explaining the financial system. Some very talented financial people need to be able to tell stories about what they’re doing – that’s just part of him being good at his job. He was so good at explaining it that you could see how he thought, his mind at work. I thought that was exciting.

At first, I just thought we’d put the interviews in the magazine. Halfway though, he became very frustrated with his job. At the end, he quit. I didn’t know for sure where we were going initially, but when he decided to quit, we had a whole narrative arc.

Contrasting doing long-form interviews with the kind narrative features he’s written for the New Yorker, Gessen noted the different goals of the interviewer:

I’ve done a fair amount of traditional journalism where you’re interviewing people. There’s a very specific way in which quotes are used in a New Yorker article. They’re partly there to be informative; they’re partly used to reveal the character of the person who’s being informative.

When you do those interviews, you’re looking for a particular thing, a particular moment, from that person. You more or less know what you want from your subject. And I wouldn’t say it’s manipulation – that’s too strong a word – but because the frame that you’re putting on the story has so much weight, your subjects become characters in the story and have particular roles to play in it. When you’re doing those interviews, you’re waiting for them to say a particular thing, as if they were fictional characters who were uncooperative.

With the hedge fund interviews, I wasn’t waiting for anything. I was waiting for him to be interesting. I wasn’t waiting very long. In a way, it was more pressure doing those interviews, because I wasn’t going to be able to write around him. So he had to be the one who was interesting.

Gessen was pleased enough with the hedge fund interviews that he searched out people from other fields, only to find not everyone was as engaging when it came to talking about work. But with the right interviewee, “to hear a live and intelligent and very particular human voice,” Gessen said, “that’s very exciting to a reader and very immediately accessible – as accessible as anything.”

Radio Q-and-A’s

Though they have a long tradition in print, interviews own a sizable share of other media, as well, and many of them are narrative. Lisa Mullins, chief anchor and senior producer for Public Radio International’s “The World,” makes it a goal to frame real-time narratives as she interviews subjects. Talking by phone last week, she outlined her approach:

When I’m preparing an interview, I want a beginning, a middle and an end. It may not stay that way when I actually execute the interview, but it always helps to have an arc to the story and have some kind of a narrative. Sometimes that narrative centers on a subject – meaning the issue that we’re talking about – or sometimes the narrative unfolds from the person’s own thoughts and history. It can go either way, but I like to have a start and a finish and then a takeaway – something that the audience will come away with at the end.

I honestly don’t believe that we always need a neat and poignant ending. We need some kind of end that doesn’t sound random. It has to be something that makes the interview whole, that gives it a sense of direction and gives listeners a sense they’ve taken a mini journey someplace, even if they haven’t gone anywhere, even if it’s just a Q-and-A on the telephone.

Mullins doesn’t employ storytelling out of a sense of duty to tradition. Her motives, she admits, may be a little more selfish:

One of the reasons I really cherish the practice of interviewing as narrative is, frankly, ego. A lot of what we do is to convince people that they will be interested, entertained and edified by whatever we’re presenting. But it’s not a given. I don’t take that interest for granted.

So my goal is to give them what I know is going to attract any listener: a really interesting story, especially around an issue they didn’t know they could be interested in. By working with this rubric of storytelling and narrative, no matter what you’re doing, you’re going to get a much better interview for yourself, you’re going to have a more cooperative interviewee, and you’re going to get the listener paying attention. It’s not like they’re being spoon-fed; they’re just being informed and entertained in the most natural way of all, and that’s through storytelling.

Mullins also emphasized the real-time role of the interviewer and the importance of discipline when a Q-and-A is going to be the final product – not to block spontaneous surprises from emerging, but to string a narrative thread that the audience can clutch, giving listeners “a place to touch down.” Interviewers have a narrative role to play, even when they’re not the ones telling the stories.

[For more on interviews as stories, read Lisa Mullins' tips for doing narrative interviews.]

I was asked to do something very familiar to lovers of All Things Nieman: “Give readers a sense of how you can use podcasts to do true narrative that includes elements of classic storytelling (introduces characters, makes use of scenes, or immerses listeners in not just sound bites but a story).” 

After much typewriting (nod to Truman Capote), I realized that this is just… not… my… thing. There are plenty of good purveyors of this advice in the public radio world already. They give seminars and talks. They have staff. They have marketing teams, nice hair and therefore aspirations to television careers. They win awards, and even have time to accept them.

Clark Boyd

I have none of that, but especially not the time or the hair (these may not be unrelated).  So, I’m going to do the only valuable thing that 14 years of daily deadline journalism have taught me. Quit fighting the assignment, turn the damn thing on its head, and see what happens…

Great radio does not equal great podcasting. There, I said it.

Let me explain. All of those wonderful things I was asked to talk about above? They do make for great radio. More specifically, they make for great long-form, narrative radio. That’s the kind of radio many of us dreamed of doing when we started the business, before so much of it, for reasons both economic and stylistic, became four and a half minute chunks of airtime filled with cribbed wire copy and bad phone tape. Both the great radio and the mediocre get turned, often auto-magically, into mp3 files. Those files are then shoved up on a server somewhere for you to download to your PodBerry or whatever.

And this, they will tell you, is podcasting. Or maybe they’ll be a little more truthful and call it “time-shifted” radio. I sometimes call it “recycled” radio.

Don’t get me wrong. Recycling is good for the audio planet. It’s great that you can stuff hours of potentially quality stuff onto a minuscule machine, encase it in a sweat-proof nano-sheath, and then listen to Diane Rehm while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. (Remember, the p-o-d in podcasting stands for “Portable On Demand.”)

But that’s it? Seriously? That’s all we are going to do with this amazing new medium for engaging unsuspecting audiences in unexpected ways?

When I started producing a weekly technology podcast four and half years ago, I wanted to take a different approach. Not radically different, but different. Sure, I wanted to base the podcast around technology stories I had been working on for the show, but I did not just want to run those pieces one after another without doing all those narrative tricks that help create a more cohesive, and above all more personal, listening experience.

First, I decided to host the podcast myself. At the time, nobody knew what a podcast was, so nobody stopped me. The first few episodes were, as you can imagine, rough. But I quickly learned some tricks. Podcast listeners engage with the material in a radically different way than broadcast listeners. My podcast audience, for example, is much more engaged with the technology content. That means I could tell the stories differently, and go places that I couldn’t on the broadcast. And that’s when the second big revelation hit me: the time limits of radio were gone.

I experimented. I started including longer versions of interviews that I had done for the radio pieces, going into greater depth with the subject matter. That proved popular with listeners. I shunned the original overly scripted leads and instead opted to make the intros more personal and more in-depth. As I recorded my intros, I would think to myself: you’re sitting at the bar, and the person next to you asks, “So, what are you working on? Why?” Listeners loved that too. I started to get emails saying, “The thing I love most about your podcast? I feel like you’re having a conversation with me, not talking at thousands of other listeners.”

Bingo. That’s solid gold to those of us who care about audio storytelling, because it means the listeners are really engaged with the tale we’re telling. They’re taking it personally. So personally that they started suggesting original ideas for interviews, segments and stories without being prompted. Soon, I realized that every podcast episode should have a podcast-exclusive interview, preferably one suggested by listeners.

In fact, I now like to say that the podcast is as much the listeners as it is mine. I’ve even started a new series focused on tech podcast listeners and the amazing jobs or hobbies they have. Talk about some natural storytellers! All I have to do is remember to just stay out their way as much as possible.

So, is this great podcasting?

Who knows?

I do know that others here at The World have taken my lead, and are producing some quite original online work that combines all of the elements of great storytelling with the best in beat reporting. Just check out my colleague Jeb Sharp’s podcast, called “How We Got Here.” Each week, she takes an in-depth look at the history behind the international news headlines. Also, Patrick Cox does an original podcast on global language that’s really worth a listen. It’s called “The World in Words.”

“So what?” you say. “What’s so big about a few disgruntled hacks who get a big head, and decide they can host their own revue shows off Off-Broadway style?”
 
Well, if you’re a public radio listener, you might just be hearing more of that informal style and content. Podcasters here at The World are now actively contributing what was once considered only “podcast material” to the Big Show. Apparently, the show’s producers like the tone we’re striking in our podcasts, and find the content “quirky, yet compelling.”

So maybe, in a real twist, recycled podcasts are now making great radio?

Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I will say this: here at The World, the feeling among the podcasters themselves is that the process of creating these different kinds of audio offerings is making us more creative storytellers. Our pieces for the show are increasingly written in ways other than the standard “read copy/play tape/read copy/play tape” format. (For someone else bucking the trend, sometimes beautifully, check out Nate DiMeo’s podcast, called “the memory palace.”)

That’s a direct result of having space in the audio sandbox to play around a bit. It’s strange, and a bit sad, to think that some of the finest audio storytellers aren’t taking more advantage of the freedom that sandbox can offer. I even hear things like “podcasting is so 2006.” We make great radio, the thinking goes, so just let the software slap the audio online and be done with it. 

Sure, it’s easy, in the same way that the Dark Side of the Force is easy.

The truth is that audio storytellers who do that are missing a great opportunity. And the void that is left is being filled by print and pixel outlets such as Slate, The Guardian and The Economist. Which are, ironically, some of the best places for creative audio storytellers to look for work these days.

Clark Boyd covers technology stories for Public Radio International’s The World and was a 2006-07 Knight Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Each of his weekly podcasts averages 50,000 to 60,000 listeners per month.

Clark Boyd

Let me set one thing straight: I don’t believe that audio is necessarily the best way to tell a story. But I’ve spent more than a decade in this beast called radio, or “the theatre of the mind,” as it was described to me when I started, and I still harbor warm and fuzzy feelings for it.

Truth be told, based on most of what I hear these days, I have to call BS on that “theatre of the mind” thing. I find very little theatrical about twenty-second clips of experts (sorry, “pundits”) interspersed with 40 second bursts of some whiny reporter (sorry, “personality”) reading his or her all-too-precious copy. Repeat that formula in four minute intervals for an hour or two, add a “host” with a “younger voice,” and you’ve got yourself a whole public radio show!

Or, better and cheaper: just turn on a microphone on, “open the lines,” and let idiots spout invective and childish name calling for hours on end. That’s called commercial radio.

Despite my cynicism, I do think that audio narrative is better (or at least more fun) for some stories. Here’s a list of reasons, in no particular order, you should consider adding audio to a narrative news project. Bear in mind I see the following through my own public radio prism:

Anthony Cordesman. If you’re going to fill a radio piece with pundits, you might as well get somebody who “gives good tape.” Cordesman, an expert on military affairs, does that, and more. It’s not just the gravitas and cadence of his sound bite, it’s also the hint of disdain for the stupid question he’s just been asked. Delicious. You can see him quoted in the NYT a million times, but until you hear him, you don’t truly understand.

Animals. Sure, television can give you cuddly videos of pregnant pandas, and the Internet is awash with LOLcats using bad grammar. But only with sound can you sit in traffic in the depths of summer, your hybrid’s air conditioning broken, and let your mind wander to the great frozen north via the snuffle and shuffle of, say, cute little harp seals across the Canadian ice. Thanks, radio! [Downside: in the theatre of the mind, it’s often hard to tell whether those animals are procreating or fighting. But then again, that’s why the whiny reporter is there.]

The audio “stand up.” This has pretty much been outlawed in American public radio, but it’s alive and well elsewhere, particularly in the BBC. It would make for a great drinking game: every time you hear an audio piece begin with unidentifiable sound, then the phrase, “I’m standing here,” you drink. My favorite of all time was a variant which featured the muffled rumblings of someone walking and huffing and puffing, followed by “I’m climbing a giant mountain of Romanian trash just outside Satu Mare.” Indeed. Drink.

Going live. There is nothing that can beat the electricity of going live, although in public radio we often try to avoid it. What if we stumble? What if we hit the wrong tape? What if, horrors, we sound human? Instead, we spend hours crafting scripts that feign the sound of spontaneity (down to writing “uhm” in the script!), and even more hours pre-recording interviews and then cutting them to make them sound “as live” as possible. But when you hear 3 ½ minutes of an anchor and a guest going live on a breaking news story, the urgency of that conversation makes you sit up and listen. And actually care. More, please.

Uighurs. Sure, it is fun to spell it for print, but trust me, it is even more fun to say. Try it yourself: <WEE-gurz>. This is also true of the Hmong <MUNG>, the Chechens <CHEH-chuns>, and a few other beleaguered world minorities that take up an inordinate amount of airtime on public radio. I don’t mean to make light of their particular plights. Giving far-flung people a voice, literally, is one of the most amazing things that radio can do. When you actually hear someone tell his or her story, in his or her own voice, you can hear when that voice breaks with fear. You can hear the four pack-a-day habit. It’s hard to get that kind of immediacy on the printed page.

Music. A tune can sell a story like almost nothing else. It’s a joy to get use it on an almost daily basis. Of course, it can backfire. From an actual email sent to The World: “You play loud, obnoxious, repetitive percussive music for stupid people, and I invariably turn the radio off and miss the program.” Oh, Margot LePine, you make me want to listen to Hüsker Dü with the volume set at 11.

Geeks and gear can take you there. Audiophiles love their stuff; we cherish both our mics and our methods. I once saw a sound engineer cover a $1,500 microphone in a thin piece of plastic, seal it with rubber bands, and then submerge it in a tub of water, all in a bid to capture the sound of loud music being piped through that water. Why? We wanted to illustrate how fish “hear.” It took five hours to get it right. At least, we hope we got it right. We’re not fish, after all.

You can release your inner Hemingway. I suppose this last entry is more of a “how-to” tip—my nod to the craft of writing for radio, the current “rules” of which are both blessings and curses. The latest from the primer: Never start a piece with sound (hackneyed). Use one thought per sentence. Include active verbs whenever possible, and try to keep it subject, verb, object. For those of you used to having free reign with dependent clauses, this should be fun. I suggest re-reading Hemingway, or going into video production instead.

Much of this list is tongue-in-cheek. But each item has an element of truth. At its best, audio narrative doesn’t just immerse you in a place and time, but does so using the voices that best know and understand that place and time. There’s a saying in my business (slightly outdated now in the digital world): “let the tape tell the story.” If you judiciously apply some of the ideas above, you’ll find that the mediating effect of the whiny “personality” can be minimized, and you can allow the listener to get that much closer to the story. My advice to all young radio reporters: stay the hell out of the way as much as possible.  

I would be interested to hear about efforts by non-radio folks to incorporate the spirit of audio narrative into their work.

Clark Boyd covers technology stories for Public Radio International’s The World and was a 2006-07 Knight Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.