Interviewing
So I recently interviewed my (third?) person for writing an article about them, this local elderly fellow who is very artistic and soon will be moving out of our little town, so the community paper wanted me to do an article about him. I walked the few hundred meters across the village to meet him at his lovely little cottage, we sat in his kitchen, we made our preliminary introductions, I asked if I could record and then started the voice recorder.
"Okay let's start at the beginning, where and when were you born?"
He answered this without elaboration, as he opened a scrap book, and began telling me about various recent art projects as he turned pages revealing photos of them. Knowing this would be useful I paid attention and asked a few pertinent questions but tried to redirect him back to his life story. Unfortunately he wasn't terribly helpful in this respect ("Do you remember your first artistic project?" "hmm no" "Were you artistic when you were a child?" "probably?"). The details I was able to get together about his life gradually came out in no sort of chronological order, told in a sometimes unintentionally misleading order ("so wait was that the house you lost in bankruptcy or the one you got in exchange for making an award winning garden? Oh it was neither it was, wait when what?").
This got me thinking about a youtube video I had recently seen about the hidden rules of conversation. I find when I interview people they want to tell me "the story" in the way they think it would or should be put down on paper (in fact the first two people had begun telling me their story as if they were directly following the outline of and paraphrasing articles about them I'd already read, I don't know if that's because the previous writer took it down exactly as told to them or the subject person themself adopted that as "the" story about them), but the way it should be put down in paper IMO should more or less follow those same "hidden rules of conversation" (basically that one thought logically follows another, is relevant to the overall topic, and is neither too much nor too little information). In the case of this most recent interview, I think my interviewee had his own idea of what the story is about (his recent art projects), but wasn't quite appreciative of the fact that if I just started in about these projects without a larger context about them, the reader would struggle to find their relevance.
Not that I'm just here to say oh this guy was a bad interviewee, and really I should have thoroughly engaged him on the art and been patient to come back to the other points I wanted to get at (as it was, by the time I circled back to the art projects he'd kind of lost steam on them); but moreover my point here is this realization that I think a lot of non-writers struggle even when they have a story because they don't realize that the rules they easily assume in conversation also apply to writing.