My new reading project is "Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes," a neat book about writing ethnographic fieldnotes. Ethnography, as I understand it, has to do with understanding a society in terms of the experiences of the people who live in it. It is a little like anthropology, only with more emphasis on culture; it is a little like sociology, only with more field work; but it's different from either of them in that it's not so much an area of study as a technique of study. You can study a lot of things using ethnography. The key feature is that you go out and talk to the people you're interested in, maybe embed yourself with them a while, and then come back and write about what you learned. In that sense, Lover's Lanes is an ethnographic project -- though its scope, abstract like love and broad like the United States, is less focused than most ethnographies. And if Lover's Lanes is an ethnography then these love stories are field notes. Since Lover's Lanes will not go beyond the field note stage -- a real ethnographer does not merely anthologize his field notes, but writes a book about his theory using his field notes as source material -- it is especially important that I write my field notes well.
I've gleaned most of this from the first five pages of the aforementioned book -- that's all I've read so far -- which makes me optimistic that reading more of it will be useful.
Another thing I've gleaned from the first five pages of "Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes" is that there's some difference of opinion about who gets to do field work. Some people think you have to be a natural-born genius to talk to people and get coherent data from them. Other people think "any literate, adventurous person" can go do field work. The authors disagree with both schools of thought, believing that conducting and writing up field work is a skill that can and must be taught, which I presume is why they bothered to write a book about it. What caught my attention about this is that they referred to the second of those theories, the idea that anyone can do field work, as the "sink or swim" approach: you learn the skills you need on the job or you don't. That is very stark, but it precisely describes what I've been planning. I'm putting a lot of pressure on myself to learn from scratch a new skill, namely making friends on purpose, in an environment where if I don't learn the skill I'll judge the whole project a failure.
Maybe it takes a natural-born genius to make friends on purpose. I never have. There have been rather few times in my life when I've set out to make friends; I don't even remember those people's names, so you can tell how well that went. It may be related to the way other people seem to be able to choose what they believe or feel, while I experience beliefs and feelings mostly as things that happen to me. In the same way, I haven't picked my friends; my friends have happened to me, thank God, and I treasure you.
So that's one variation on Lover's Lanes I could pursue. Make the trip, but don't try to make friends on purpose. Don't approach a single person for an interview. In the course of the journey there will be conversations. Trust that friends, or at least acquaintances, will happen to me. When they happen, ask them for their stories. That's a nice vision that plays to my strengths. But it relies a lot on luck. Luck is good to have around but you can't count on it. What's the saying? "Believe in God but keep the powder dry," or something like that? Me, I'm still working on figuring out which end you point at the bad guy.
Showing posts with label interviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label interviews. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
One story building
Last week I wrote a pretty good story! It needs editing in places, particularly in the beginning before I was sure how I wanted to structure it, but overall I'm pretty pleased with the result. Distinctive, well-paced, some conflict, and with that wonderful somewhat inconclusive quality that separates much nonfiction from most fiction. If I can keep that up then on this journey I can at least produce something coherent enough to present to an editor as a strong first draft. I've got plans in place to do another practice interview, then interview a friend of Alice's who's a stranger to me, and then at last hit up someone for a story who hasn't already agreed to the chat.
One quandary that came out while I was writing had to do with who the main character of the story was. We're seeing everything through Alice's eyes; it's her memories, her experiences, her dilemmas. She's the main character, especially in the last couple installments. Yet she gets less direct characterization than Joel or his parents do. Alice tells you what kind of guy Joel is, but she mostly doesn't tell you who she is. I certainly can't tell you more about her than she tells me, because I'm writing this story under the pretense that Alice is a stranger. It's sort of a corollary of how in some first-person novels you can go the entire length of the book without discovering the narrator's name. All you know about Alice is the little she tells you plus what you can infer from how she talks and what she does in the story. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Should I at least introduce her as a blonde white woman in her twenties, single, who's lived in Fort Myers most of her life? Should I let that come out, or not, in the course of the story if it turns out to pertain to it? Or do these basic facts of biography always pertain to any story?
Another quandary: is it fair to Joel and his parents that I'm presenting Alice's judgments of them without a counterpoint? I suppose I could try to get in touch with them to get their sides, but I want these stories to be vignettes, not treatises. I don't think there's anything wrong with presenting only Alice's impressions, with the caveat that I've made the conscious decision to believe my subjects when I can. This credulity is necessary because of my format -- doubt on my part without opposing witnesses is gratuitous -- but it may also be desirable. I'm not going to get a lot of openness from my subjects if they feel like I'm looking for holes in their stories like some kind of itinerant trial lawyer. So I'll be gullible, which fortunately comes naturally to me.
The problem, of course, comes when someone is actually lying to me, or exaggerating to the point of lying. They're still telling me a love story, I suppose, but not a true one, and possibly a slanderous one. This is why I'm always going to use pseudonyms for anyone I haven't interviewed; I'm not interested in being an accessory to libel. If I should catch a major inconsistency in someone's tale, I'm not going to think of it as a lie but as a literary coup. I have to ask them to clarify -- since if their story isn't coherent mine certainly won't be -- but what an opportunity to see how people remember (or choose to remember) the events of their lives! If I necessarily let the subjects paint their own self-portraits through their storytelling, then how interesting it will be to see whether they are realists or impressionists, or whether they gloss over faults or exaggerate them...
Now all I need is subjects!
One quandary that came out while I was writing had to do with who the main character of the story was. We're seeing everything through Alice's eyes; it's her memories, her experiences, her dilemmas. She's the main character, especially in the last couple installments. Yet she gets less direct characterization than Joel or his parents do. Alice tells you what kind of guy Joel is, but she mostly doesn't tell you who she is. I certainly can't tell you more about her than she tells me, because I'm writing this story under the pretense that Alice is a stranger. It's sort of a corollary of how in some first-person novels you can go the entire length of the book without discovering the narrator's name. All you know about Alice is the little she tells you plus what you can infer from how she talks and what she does in the story. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Should I at least introduce her as a blonde white woman in her twenties, single, who's lived in Fort Myers most of her life? Should I let that come out, or not, in the course of the story if it turns out to pertain to it? Or do these basic facts of biography always pertain to any story?
Another quandary: is it fair to Joel and his parents that I'm presenting Alice's judgments of them without a counterpoint? I suppose I could try to get in touch with them to get their sides, but I want these stories to be vignettes, not treatises. I don't think there's anything wrong with presenting only Alice's impressions, with the caveat that I've made the conscious decision to believe my subjects when I can. This credulity is necessary because of my format -- doubt on my part without opposing witnesses is gratuitous -- but it may also be desirable. I'm not going to get a lot of openness from my subjects if they feel like I'm looking for holes in their stories like some kind of itinerant trial lawyer. So I'll be gullible, which fortunately comes naturally to me.
The problem, of course, comes when someone is actually lying to me, or exaggerating to the point of lying. They're still telling me a love story, I suppose, but not a true one, and possibly a slanderous one. This is why I'm always going to use pseudonyms for anyone I haven't interviewed; I'm not interested in being an accessory to libel. If I should catch a major inconsistency in someone's tale, I'm not going to think of it as a lie but as a literary coup. I have to ask them to clarify -- since if their story isn't coherent mine certainly won't be -- but what an opportunity to see how people remember (or choose to remember) the events of their lives! If I necessarily let the subjects paint their own self-portraits through their storytelling, then how interesting it will be to see whether they are realists or impressionists, or whether they gloss over faults or exaggerate them...
Now all I need is subjects!
Monday, March 23, 2009
Lessons from the frontier
I'm writing this post the night after my very first interview! For a first try, I think it was a tremendous success. I interviewed a friend, who I'll call Alice, at her apartment after we had dinner together at Perkins. It was a comfortable way to go into my first interview and both of us felt relaxed as we sat on her sofa, Kino listening from the coffee table, and she began to tell her story.
The content of the story is a topic for later this week. Today I want to talk about the interview as an interview, and in particular what I learned from it. In gross terms, the most surprising feature of our chat was its length: it clocked in at a cool forty-seven minutes! I'd been expecting that interviews would be shorter than that, maybe ten or fifteen minutes. Probably they will be; strangers haven't set the evening aside for me like Alice did, and Alice is talkative by nature. This is important. Pascal said that he wrote a long letter for lack of time to write a short one, and my experience tonight makes me think something similar will be true of interviews. Tonight Alice and I had time to explore several different angles of her love story. I won't always have that luxury. Getting enough interesting detail to make the story unique in ten or fifteen minutes will be harder than doing it in just under an hour.
Which leads into another aspect of interviewing I didn't realize was important until tonight: finding an angle. Boy meets girl is a good story, which is why it's been told so many times, but it's never told the same way twice. Romeo and Juliet is "boy meets girl, only they're from warring clans;" Pride and Prejudice is "boy meets girl, only they're of different social strata;" WALL-E is "boy meets girl, only they're robots;" and so on. These are oversimplifications, but the point is that the story always has a premise beyond the fact of love. Sometimes it's a source of conflict, sometimes of novelty. The same has to be true of my subjects' stories. My job as an interviewer is not just to facilitate storytelling; it's to capture the most unique aspects of the story and how they relate to the common ones. Never at the expense of reality, of course! I'm not going to write caricatures that emphasize an element that was unimportant to the subject's actual experience; I'd sooner not use the interview. But I will find and focus on important elements that distinguish this story from every other love story. Tonight that meant asking questions about the dynamic between Alice's high school boyfriend and his parents. Theirs was an odd relationship that was the source of some tension between Alice and her boyfriend and bore indirectly on other frustrations she had with him. If I could do the interview again I would have focused more on that -- though thanks to the interview's generous length I got an interesting story out of it even without knowing going in that I needed to look for an angle. The hard part will be sussing out that angle under the pressure of time.
Enough for today. More tomorrow!
The content of the story is a topic for later this week. Today I want to talk about the interview as an interview, and in particular what I learned from it. In gross terms, the most surprising feature of our chat was its length: it clocked in at a cool forty-seven minutes! I'd been expecting that interviews would be shorter than that, maybe ten or fifteen minutes. Probably they will be; strangers haven't set the evening aside for me like Alice did, and Alice is talkative by nature. This is important. Pascal said that he wrote a long letter for lack of time to write a short one, and my experience tonight makes me think something similar will be true of interviews. Tonight Alice and I had time to explore several different angles of her love story. I won't always have that luxury. Getting enough interesting detail to make the story unique in ten or fifteen minutes will be harder than doing it in just under an hour.
Which leads into another aspect of interviewing I didn't realize was important until tonight: finding an angle. Boy meets girl is a good story, which is why it's been told so many times, but it's never told the same way twice. Romeo and Juliet is "boy meets girl, only they're from warring clans;" Pride and Prejudice is "boy meets girl, only they're of different social strata;" WALL-E is "boy meets girl, only they're robots;" and so on. These are oversimplifications, but the point is that the story always has a premise beyond the fact of love. Sometimes it's a source of conflict, sometimes of novelty. The same has to be true of my subjects' stories. My job as an interviewer is not just to facilitate storytelling; it's to capture the most unique aspects of the story and how they relate to the common ones. Never at the expense of reality, of course! I'm not going to write caricatures that emphasize an element that was unimportant to the subject's actual experience; I'd sooner not use the interview. But I will find and focus on important elements that distinguish this story from every other love story. Tonight that meant asking questions about the dynamic between Alice's high school boyfriend and his parents. Theirs was an odd relationship that was the source of some tension between Alice and her boyfriend and bore indirectly on other frustrations she had with him. If I could do the interview again I would have focused more on that -- though thanks to the interview's generous length I got an interesting story out of it even without knowing going in that I needed to look for an angle. The hard part will be sussing out that angle under the pressure of time.
Enough for today. More tomorrow!
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Pheidippides, at your service
There are two schools of thought surrounding cold swimming pools: you can wade in gradually, or you can take the plunge all at once. The same goes for removing Band-Aids, filing taxes, and enduring various other minor daily discomforts. Slow and steady wins the race versus it hurts less if you get it over with. On the other hand, you don't approach a marathon that way. You can't just run it real quick and get it over with; unlike ripping off a Band-Aid, marathoning has to be slow and steady. The same goes for training for a marathon. Coaches use the rule of thumb that a marathoner in training should increase his distance by no more than 10% per week. If you can only jog one mile at the outset, it therefore takes eight months to train for the 26-mile race. You build up to the event slowly and with discipline if you have any real ambition of success.
All this circumlocution leads up to this question: is interviewing more like a Band-Aid or a marathon? Do you have to work up to it by degrees, or can you just do it? The idea of asking a stranger for an interview has not grown less terrifying over the last month and a half; on the contrary, as the event has gotten closer the proximity has made it seem larger. Should I treat interviewing as a cold swimming pool which, perhaps, one should just dive into -- begin straight off with asking strangers for love stories? Or should I treat it as the marathon -- begin by interviewing a friend, and work up to strangers by degrees as I grow more comfortable with the process? I'm inclined towards the latter, but then I would be; I'm a procrastinator in some ways and wouldn't mind putting off the moment of truth. Yet to be fair to my own instinct, I might very well be more comfortable approaching someone unfamiliar if what I approach them with is not also completely unfamiliar. (It's partly for a similar reason that I want to start my interviews with easy questions like "what do you do?" and "how long have you lived in East Kudzuburg?" -- my subjects will be more comfortable if they don't have to plunge right into deep and private waters, and for that matter, so will I.)
So I'm hoping that this weekend I'll be able to get together with a friend and do some conditioning, to return to the marathoning metaphor. I'm a lot less likely to be turned down, and maybe afterward they can share feedback that might help me conduct a better interview next time. Then I can return home and play back the recording, courtesy of Kino, and listen for questions I missed. If I can't get a hold of anyone, I'll work on an alternative.
All this circumlocution leads up to this question: is interviewing more like a Band-Aid or a marathon? Do you have to work up to it by degrees, or can you just do it? The idea of asking a stranger for an interview has not grown less terrifying over the last month and a half; on the contrary, as the event has gotten closer the proximity has made it seem larger. Should I treat interviewing as a cold swimming pool which, perhaps, one should just dive into -- begin straight off with asking strangers for love stories? Or should I treat it as the marathon -- begin by interviewing a friend, and work up to strangers by degrees as I grow more comfortable with the process? I'm inclined towards the latter, but then I would be; I'm a procrastinator in some ways and wouldn't mind putting off the moment of truth. Yet to be fair to my own instinct, I might very well be more comfortable approaching someone unfamiliar if what I approach them with is not also completely unfamiliar. (It's partly for a similar reason that I want to start my interviews with easy questions like "what do you do?" and "how long have you lived in East Kudzuburg?" -- my subjects will be more comfortable if they don't have to plunge right into deep and private waters, and for that matter, so will I.)
So I'm hoping that this weekend I'll be able to get together with a friend and do some conditioning, to return to the marathoning metaphor. I'm a lot less likely to be turned down, and maybe afterward they can share feedback that might help me conduct a better interview next time. Then I can return home and play back the recording, courtesy of Kino, and listen for questions I missed. If I can't get a hold of anyone, I'll work on an alternative.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Unasked questions
Mission accomplished! It turns out the laptop-ready Internet card costs $60 a month with a minimum commitment of two years. Ouch! The question I forgot to ask, of course, is whether there's a way to get the card without the commitment, since I don't expect to be on the road for more than three months. I ran into this problem while apartment hunting, too: there is always a question you forget to ask, so ultimately you always act on incomplete information. The trick is finding some joy in this, which comes from listening to your gut and not making everything an optimization problem. Still, more bills...
Speaking of questions to ask, I want to do my first interview this weekend. Interviewing, however, is a difficult skill! My interviews are going to be what sociologists call "unstructured" in that I'm not going into them with a list of preset questions to ask, but that doesn't mean they don't require preparation. Even apart from needing courage to approach someone -- a private struggle that I'll blog about once I understand it better -- the best way to handle an interviewee is not obvious and probably varies widely. My goal is to get my subject to tell a love story in a way that puts me and my readers on the scene. The first obstacle, once I have a willing subject, is that they may not have a story in mind. I'm coming up with some "kindling" to help get the fire burning -- prompts like "Do you remember your first date?" or "How about a moment that made you very proud or very ashamed?"
Once they've settled on the story, the next obstacle is striking a fine balance between asking questions and listening. I need to be quick to intercept my subject if I need to ask a question about background, whether that's "who's Joanne?" or "wait, why were you swimming in a shark tank in the first place?", lest the tale become incomprehensible. I need to stay curious so that I don't forget to ask important questions (while accepting that to some extent it's inevitable, as I said above). On the other hand, I don't want to tread on the narrative. I can't interrupt them every few words; to some extent I have to trust them to tell their own stories. It's tough. Fortunately, many of the skills involved are a lot like the skills you use in having an everyday conversation -- which I want my interviews to resemble -- so none of this should be completely exotic. The hardest part in some ways may be communicating my sympathy, which is necessary if I expect my interviewee to be open with me, and doing it with subject after subject for however many thousands of miles the journey runs.
A challenge! But then, professional journalists do man-on-the-street interviews all the time and apparently get people to talk to them. I'll keep thinking about what approach to use, while remembering that the body of the interview is basically a special kind of conversation. I can handle conversations.
Speaking of questions to ask, I want to do my first interview this weekend. Interviewing, however, is a difficult skill! My interviews are going to be what sociologists call "unstructured" in that I'm not going into them with a list of preset questions to ask, but that doesn't mean they don't require preparation. Even apart from needing courage to approach someone -- a private struggle that I'll blog about once I understand it better -- the best way to handle an interviewee is not obvious and probably varies widely. My goal is to get my subject to tell a love story in a way that puts me and my readers on the scene. The first obstacle, once I have a willing subject, is that they may not have a story in mind. I'm coming up with some "kindling" to help get the fire burning -- prompts like "Do you remember your first date?" or "How about a moment that made you very proud or very ashamed?"
Once they've settled on the story, the next obstacle is striking a fine balance between asking questions and listening. I need to be quick to intercept my subject if I need to ask a question about background, whether that's "who's Joanne?" or "wait, why were you swimming in a shark tank in the first place?", lest the tale become incomprehensible. I need to stay curious so that I don't forget to ask important questions (while accepting that to some extent it's inevitable, as I said above). On the other hand, I don't want to tread on the narrative. I can't interrupt them every few words; to some extent I have to trust them to tell their own stories. It's tough. Fortunately, many of the skills involved are a lot like the skills you use in having an everyday conversation -- which I want my interviews to resemble -- so none of this should be completely exotic. The hardest part in some ways may be communicating my sympathy, which is necessary if I expect my interviewee to be open with me, and doing it with subject after subject for however many thousands of miles the journey runs.
A challenge! But then, professional journalists do man-on-the-street interviews all the time and apparently get people to talk to them. I'll keep thinking about what approach to use, while remembering that the body of the interview is basically a special kind of conversation. I can handle conversations.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Day's anatomy, part 2
To see how the three-day rule works, let's try a test case: Mobile, Alabama. I chose Mobile because I know absolutely nothing about it and because it's an early stop on the first-draft route of our journey.
The previous stop will probably have been Pensacola; I'll just have driven an awesome bridge stretch of I-10 that spans Mobile Bay by way of various islands and peninsulas that stud the delta. Though it's a long bridge, it's a short drive. Google Maps estimates 55 minutes from Pensacola to Mobile, and that may actually not be too unrealistic; with the magic of Street View I can see that the bridge is actually four lanes, which I wouldn't have guessed, so I'm unlikely to get stuck behind a semi. If I leave Pensacola at eleven I can be at a Days Inn near I-65 by one at the latest.
Why Days Inn? Because a friend of mine who went on a road trip of her own last year reports that Days Inn is the best for having safe, comfortable, affordable rooms, and also because it's everywhere. I could look into local bed and breakfasts or something, and maybe sometimes I will, and I'm now a certified member of CouchSurfing.com so I have that option, but Days Inn will always be a good fallback.
The particular inn I'm looking at in Mobile is near the mall, which is a minus in terms of noise but means I'm likely to be in a district where I can buy groceries and get laundry done. What's more, it's spitting distance from Spring Hill College, which according to Wikipedia is a historically significant Jesuit college full of young people whose love stories just might have something to do with their faith. Score!!! I can probably visit on the day I arrive while I wait for check-in time at the inn. The University of South Alabama is only a little farther afield and might make a good Day Two destination.
A quick search for laundromats turns several up nearby, along with two Circle K locations, so necessities are covered after check-in on Day One. Nearby Dauphin Street is crowded with restaurants if I feel like splurging. With the interstate nearby it's mostly fast food, but there's also a Chinese place, and there are several cafes near the college and elsewhere, which just might mean more love stories. Bizarrely, there are four nursing homes within a mile of the inn, also good story repositories. And who knows what I'll pass on the way to and from all these places that might draw my attention. Plenty to fill Day Two even if I don't make it to the university.
If indeed the second day is as fruitful as I hope it'll be, I'll spend another night in Mobile and continue along I-10 the next morning. Biloxi would be the obvious next destination, or I could plow through Mississippi the better to reach New Orleans, surely one of the ten most important cities to visit on a trip like this. Either way, I'll have had a great visit to Mobile, busy without being exhausting, and full of stories!
The previous stop will probably have been Pensacola; I'll just have driven an awesome bridge stretch of I-10 that spans Mobile Bay by way of various islands and peninsulas that stud the delta. Though it's a long bridge, it's a short drive. Google Maps estimates 55 minutes from Pensacola to Mobile, and that may actually not be too unrealistic; with the magic of Street View I can see that the bridge is actually four lanes, which I wouldn't have guessed, so I'm unlikely to get stuck behind a semi. If I leave Pensacola at eleven I can be at a Days Inn near I-65 by one at the latest.
Why Days Inn? Because a friend of mine who went on a road trip of her own last year reports that Days Inn is the best for having safe, comfortable, affordable rooms, and also because it's everywhere. I could look into local bed and breakfasts or something, and maybe sometimes I will, and I'm now a certified member of CouchSurfing.com so I have that option, but Days Inn will always be a good fallback.
The particular inn I'm looking at in Mobile is near the mall, which is a minus in terms of noise but means I'm likely to be in a district where I can buy groceries and get laundry done. What's more, it's spitting distance from Spring Hill College, which according to Wikipedia is a historically significant Jesuit college full of young people whose love stories just might have something to do with their faith. Score!!! I can probably visit on the day I arrive while I wait for check-in time at the inn. The University of South Alabama is only a little farther afield and might make a good Day Two destination.
A quick search for laundromats turns several up nearby, along with two Circle K locations, so necessities are covered after check-in on Day One. Nearby Dauphin Street is crowded with restaurants if I feel like splurging. With the interstate nearby it's mostly fast food, but there's also a Chinese place, and there are several cafes near the college and elsewhere, which just might mean more love stories. Bizarrely, there are four nursing homes within a mile of the inn, also good story repositories. And who knows what I'll pass on the way to and from all these places that might draw my attention. Plenty to fill Day Two even if I don't make it to the university.
If indeed the second day is as fruitful as I hope it'll be, I'll spend another night in Mobile and continue along I-10 the next morning. Biloxi would be the obvious next destination, or I could plow through Mississippi the better to reach New Orleans, surely one of the ten most important cities to visit on a trip like this. Either way, I'll have had a great visit to Mobile, busy without being exhausting, and full of stories!
Monday, February 16, 2009
Paging Dr. House
When you're planning something you've never done before and you're not busy thinking of ways it could go wrong, you're consumed by the potential of what you're doing. I wrote down a fantasy of mine today, and it occurred to me that the people I talk to this summer might tell me their fantasies instead of true-to-life love stories, or at least might embellish the truth to turn crushes into lovers, prostitutes into mistresses, and "it's not you, it's me" breakups into "the bitch cheated on me" breakups. I'm not sure what to do about that short of offering each of my correspondents a sodium pentothol cocktail before the interview, so I've resolved to believe everything I hear while I'm sitting down with them listening to their story. Skepticism can wait until I'm back in the car. After all, the way in which the storyteller lies says a lot about the storyteller, and the reader's choices about what to believe say a lot about the reader. The fine dance of those near-identical twins fantasy and reality will add a certain texture to the stories. It's not even clear which twin will teach us more about love.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
You can trust me, I'm an itinerant anthropologist
The hardest part of this journey will have nothing to do with the journey. The car could break down in the middle of the Sonora and that would be tough. I could get mugged by a couple of laid-off auto workers in Detroit and that would be tough. My funds could run out in Bangor and I could find myself sleeping in the car for a week on my way back to Florida and that would be tough. But none of these things would be as tough as something that is absolutely certain to happen -- maybe several times a day -- for as long as this journey lasts.
I'm going to have to go up to people and ask them for their love stories.
See, it's a little weird with me and people. Sometimes I roll a natural 20 -- that's like being dealt a straight flush, if you don't know what I'm talking about -- and I am the most charming, engaging person on the planet. The rest of the time, though, I'm awkward, nervous, reluctant to make the first move. Once I'm sitting down one-on-one with a person I can hold up my end of the conversation, as long as my end involves more listening than talking, but getting to that point scares the hell out of me.
So what the heck am I going to say to people I want to interview? I've been thinking about various lines and none of them sound quite right. "Hi there, do you have a minute? My name's Brian. I'm driving across the country collecting stories and writing a book about love. Do you have time to tell me a story?" I mean, okay, not bad, not too aggressive, casts it as a favor you can do for me, establishes me as an author (the rare demographic people still trust), and gets the point across, but makes me sound scruffy and doesn't encourage real emotional engagement. Or maybe it does because love stories are by definition about emotional engagement. That's the best line I've got so far.
And what the heck are they going to say to me? What percentage of my potential interviewees are going to be creeped out, or figure I'm selling something, or get offended about being approached by a stranger about something so private, or freeze up when put on the spot? Or just be too busy? People are busy a lot. I guess that's the advantage of talking to people in laundromats and diners and such -- places where people have nothing else to do. It might also help to approach couples or groups, which might make things less intimidating for the interviewees (and have the added benefit that I get stories out of more than one person).
So there are difficulties on both ends. I have to be willing to put myself out there, and I have to be willing to understand when other people won't. The first I can control; the second I can't. What would you say if someone came up to you in a bar and asked for a love story?
I'm going to have to go up to people and ask them for their love stories.
See, it's a little weird with me and people. Sometimes I roll a natural 20 -- that's like being dealt a straight flush, if you don't know what I'm talking about -- and I am the most charming, engaging person on the planet. The rest of the time, though, I'm awkward, nervous, reluctant to make the first move. Once I'm sitting down one-on-one with a person I can hold up my end of the conversation, as long as my end involves more listening than talking, but getting to that point scares the hell out of me.
So what the heck am I going to say to people I want to interview? I've been thinking about various lines and none of them sound quite right. "Hi there, do you have a minute? My name's Brian. I'm driving across the country collecting stories and writing a book about love. Do you have time to tell me a story?" I mean, okay, not bad, not too aggressive, casts it as a favor you can do for me, establishes me as an author (the rare demographic people still trust), and gets the point across, but makes me sound scruffy and doesn't encourage real emotional engagement. Or maybe it does because love stories are by definition about emotional engagement. That's the best line I've got so far.
And what the heck are they going to say to me? What percentage of my potential interviewees are going to be creeped out, or figure I'm selling something, or get offended about being approached by a stranger about something so private, or freeze up when put on the spot? Or just be too busy? People are busy a lot. I guess that's the advantage of talking to people in laundromats and diners and such -- places where people have nothing else to do. It might also help to approach couples or groups, which might make things less intimidating for the interviewees (and have the added benefit that I get stories out of more than one person).
So there are difficulties on both ends. I have to be willing to put myself out there, and I have to be willing to understand when other people won't. The first I can control; the second I can't. What would you say if someone came up to you in a bar and asked for a love story?
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