You have arranged a conversation with a hero (let’s continue to consider a potential interview with a scientist). But so far you have defined the topic very roughly. At this stage your task is to find out as much as you can about the person and their work, so that the questions crystallize on their own.
But there is too much information. Open, for example, scientific articles by Tatiana Chernigovskaya – to read them all, and then read and listen to an interview with her, it will take months. So the boundaries should be marked all the same.
Usually I am guided by four principles:
I take the main topics with which my protagonist directly worked;
I choose from these and related topics what’s interesting to me;
I figure out what might resonate with the editors and readers of the particular magazine I am interviewing;
Thinking about what might be interesting and useful to a wider audience.
Where to look for information on the topic of the interview
The first place to look is the website of the university where your protagonist works.
Then open YouTube.
Scientists, like everyone else, are rarely in an information vacuum; often they have given interviews, participated in shows, and given lectures before, all of which are on YouTube. Since lectures usually last more than an hour, you can set the speed to 1.75 and write out only what is relevant to your still approximate topic.
Text interviews are also a useful thing. Scientists rarely do such interviews, but if you are preparing for an interview with an artist or athlete, the chances increase.
The next resource is the hero’s social networks. As I said, they often post information of interest to them within their scientific interests there, scientific jokes which with the right skill can be inserted into a question or at least mentioned to show that you are on topic. And there are also debates in the comments – often a gold mine.
How to work with information.
You’ve more or less decided on the direction of the interview, you’ve opened articles and videos. What’s next? Usually I just copy whole paragraphs that interest me – and put together a multi-page sheet. Sometimes even during the copying there is a question, I write it down under the paragraph, so as not to forget.
Then I reread it all and create questions for the hero. The question is made up of the information you directly worked with, your knowledge from other areas, and your observation. The final look of the question is given by your attitude toward life and yourself: if you’re more of a laughing person, the questions will contain humor one way or another, if serious, then no.
Personally, I prefer to formulate questions in an unconventional and funny way. This has its intention: first, scientists, since we started talking about them, people are smart, most intelligent people have a good sense of humor, and humor often brings people together.
Secondly, the interviewees are asked the same questions over and over again, and they give the same answers in order to save energy. If we want to make the interview special, different from others, this chain must be broken. The easiest way to break it is with a crazy image or a crazy comparison. In this case, the person stops, answers in a similar style (not always, but often) and adds something he or she has been thinking about recently in this context – this breaks the pattern and unleashes the imagination. But at the end, I check my questions with an internal scanner – I don’t want to turn the interview into one big joke, and some questions must remain simple and serious.
Thirdly, it is important to me that the readers feel good inside the interview: they should understand the topic of the conversation, get new information, they should not feel like fools against the background of a smart expert and a pro-witted interviewer.
It is great if they can also have a little fun.
But not all heroes are disposed to crazy questions, even if the outwardly absurd thesis is based on logic. However, whether or not a person is disposed can only be established directly at the interview by getting to know the person. Sometimes during a conversation, I would remove all the tinsel from the question, leaving only the essence.
.
When you line up questions, you often want to start as vividly as possible to get everyone’s attention at once, but that’s not always appropriate. Sometimes you need to run through basic things with a character, so that readers can then better understand the flow of the conversation. For example, if we’re talking to a physicist about dimensions and space, it’s better to ask him or her right away what dimensions and space are – even if these terms are intuitive, even if you have an excellent grasp of scientific definitions. If you are doing an interview not for a scientific journal, but for a popular science journal, many of its readers do not know the intricacies of the subject and do not need to know.
But let’s move away from the scientific interview a bit. If you have to interview a famous person, go through all the interviews with her you can find. Very soon you will find that the person is asked the same questions, and he himself answers in a similar way. Rejoice.
Bad interviews are your friends. Take all those same questions and spin them around, and think about how you could have presented even that question differently: in a way that would make the person think and answer differently.
Let’s say you notice that the person repeatedly talks with irritation about the lavish illuminations in the city, saying that all that money could be given to a charitable foundation. If you start the question with a sigh: “Oh, how much is being spent on these illuminations, don’t you think? – you get a legitimate answer. Then you spin the question further and realize that if the city doesn’t have lights, the residents probably won’t be in a festive mood.
If you ask, “Do you want people not to have a holiday, only foundation wards to have one?” the person is likely to answer briefly and aggressively. Instead, you can create a hypothetical situation: “If you were in charge of decorating the city for the holidays, how would you allocate the budget with the stipulation that you could let the money that was left over go to charity?” You can then ask a qualifying question about how to create a holiday for all of the town’s residents without depriving them of the joy.
Spin trivial questions and trivial answers.
And remember that you already know the person’s position, so you have all the power in your hands. You can calculate the conversation for a few moves and, as a consequence, you’ll be able to control it quite well, to lead in the direction you want.
But also remember: you know a lot about the person, but not everything, so do not try to impose their point of view, to convince him that he is the way you imagined it. Even if the interlocutor is a hypocrite, show it through questions – readers and viewers themselves will understand who is in front of them.
During preparation, you can limit yourself to general knowledge and data from your character’s work; you can add questions that the character has not directly touched. Study Russian and foreign scientists who also deal with this topic. To do this, the easiest way is to open the hero’s research paper and to long the list of references. There will be actual foreign authors and names of works. We read these authors, and then they, too, look at the list of references. Then look for scholars who argued with the first authors. This should be done to avoid one-sidedness and make the conversation sharper.
It is also not superfluous to arm yourself with statistics. Look at opinion polls, data on the dynamics of something – it will help you make the issue more interesting and relevant.
Tip: Don’t overdo it: sometimes, in your enthusiasm, you might accidentally insert an answer or ask a too narrowly professional question that your reader doesn’t need an answer to.