What to do with a failed interview
If you can’t revive an interview for a long time, several days, it’s probably dead. It happens. But there is a way out. It can be turned into a profile article: talk about your hero and his work in the third person and add direct and indirect quotations.
In most cases, you can bring not the hero to the forefront, but the topic or problem: then, in the case of a material-questionnaire, you should add the answers of other experts to the same questions as monologues, in the case of a problem article – study statistics and talk about the problem yourself, the hero of the interview will be left as an expert on the subject.
In most cases, the text does not come alive with any transformations only when it is trivial, non-specific and tells about what the reader is not interested. So you made a mistake in the choice of the hero, or did not dig deep enough into the topic to come up with successful questions.
But before any maneuvers (before you rewrite the text or delete it altogether) is better to consult with the editor. Perhaps you haven’t yet developed criteria for evaluating the material and can’t see that there’s nothing wrong with the text, perhaps you’re a perfectionist, or perhaps it’s really that bad – talk to him before you waste your energy.
Sometimes you can’t get the text to flow smoothly so that all the questions flow one from the other because you’ve talked to the person on vastly different topics. You make transitions in the questions, but those transitions look contrived. In such cases, I either make a subheading or write the word “PICTURE” in front of the new topic question – it means that a large block of text has ended and you need to at least visually repel it. After that, the editor puts a big illustration in that place. Such pictures work more effectively in videos. Watch any interview, wait for a splash page or commercial and see what the interviewer will talk to the person about next, whether there is a connection with the previous topic.
Aligning the interview
I send the text to the hero in google docs with the ability to comment and ask him or her beforehand to look only for factual errors. Lucky if the person actually corrects only factual errors. More often than not, characters want to rewrite whole chunks, sometimes even getting into questions. As a result, an elaborate and flying text without clerisms turns into a sea monster with diabetes and flat feet.
The characters get around the restriction of access in a simple way: they copy the text into Word, rewrite a lot, and then return it. As a result, the journalist is forced to check this version against the original one (the “Compare Documents” option in the “Tools” menu comes in handy here). But even if the person confined himself to comments, there can be a lot of them. I once had 837 comments left on a 12-page text.
All these comments and edits should be considered by the journalist, because by law, the hero is the co-author of the interview, and an uncoordinated text can become the subject of a lawsuit. Some things can and sometimes must be quietly accepted, some things can be argued with – mildly and argumentatively.
Sometimes you have to convince the hero that the magazine does not write in such language, and the literary editor will in any case remove the clerical language and cumbersome constructions, then – that funny situations and vivid examples will favor the reader. And it often works.
Characters emasculate the text largely because they are afraid to see their living language, it seems to them rude or swagger, while the reader rather perceives it positively: “at least someone speaks humanly. Especially scary for those people who have written in scientific or official business style for many years. So their behavior is absolutely natural. You can be angry with yourself, but you do not need to express your anger to the hero. Reconciliation is one of the stages of working on the interview.
Interview evaluation criteria
Once a journalist came to me and said that he could not understand when his text was good and when it was still bad, whether it needed to be improved, how good the questions were. The answer is: the criterion – you yourself (with this I will argue a little lower. – Ed.). If you like the questions, if you find them original, deep and accurate, if you feel there is enough in the answers of your interlocutor, if you feel that the material is useful or emotional, then the interview is fine, you can safely send it to the editor. The editor also has his own ideas about what is beautiful-and this is where many authors feel deeply hurt. But how this particular situation is handled: agree with the editor, disagree, or compromise is up to you.
A legitimate question: how can a person be a criterion if he or she changes? Yes, a person changes, that’s why it’s often very scary to open your early works, it’s hard to understand how they got published in the first place. But the criterion is always just you, that you like it. It’s good to know your reader, to understand what kind of fruit they are, but thinking about what those same readers will think of you as an interviewer or your questions is counterproductive. You’ll be targeting thousands of imaginary people, imaginary because you don’t really know them. It’s more reliable to focus on one and one you’ve more or less researched – yourself. If you like it, people like you will like it.
The only thing you can’t forget is the magazine you’re writing for, its audience. You can be an ace in the hermeneutics of ancient Russian literature, and your interview will be with a similar ace, you will both be terribly pleased with the result. But you won’t send the interview to a scholarly journal, but to a popular-scientific one. Most will simply not understand you, worse, some will think they are completely stupid. But they won’t be the stupid ones.