Interviewing People You Meet for a Long Read

Sooner or later, a long piece about a place needs other voices in it. The woman who has run the ferry kiosk for twenty years knows things about the harbour that no amount of walking will teach you. The farmer at the edge of town sees the weather differently from the visitor who came for the view. Talking to people is how a piece stops being one traveller’s impression and starts to feel like a place.

Most of the people you will talk to are not public figures and did not expect to be in anybody’s story. That changes how you ask, how you listen and what you owe them afterwards. These are the habits we would suggest for anyone interviewing people they meet along the way.

Before you ask anything

The first conversation is rarely an interview. It is a chat at a counter, a question about directions that turns into twenty minutes about the town. Enjoy it, but notice the moment it becomes material. That is the moment to say what you are doing.

Say it plainly and early: you are writing a piece about this place, you would like to talk with them for it, and what they say might appear in print under their name or a description of them. Tell them where it will be published and roughly who reads it. Most people are happy to help. Some are not, and the time to learn that is now, not after you have filled three pages.

It helps to arrive with a little homework. You do not need a list of twenty questions, but you should know enough about the place that your questions are worth answering. People can tell the difference between curiosity and filling time, and they open up to the first.

Asking questions that open a conversation

The best interview questions are short and invite a story rather than a verdict. What was this street like when you first came here? will take you further than Has the street changed a lot?, which can be answered with a nod. Questions beginning with how, what and tell me about tend to open; questions beginning with do, is and would you say tend to close.

Ask about things people have actually done and seen, not opinions on large abstractions. Someone asked about tourism in general will give you the same views you could read anywhere. Someone asked what changed in their own week when the cruise boats started arriving will tell you something only they know.

Keep a few questions in reserve for the end, and always include one you did not plan: Is there anything I should have asked and didn’t? It sounds like politeness. In practice it often produces the best material of the whole conversation, because it hands the person the chance to talk about what matters to them rather than what matters to you.

Listening, and the use of silence

The hardest skill in interviewing is not asking; it is waiting. When someone finishes an answer, there is a pause in which most of us rush to fill the space with the next question. Try leaving it. People often add the most interesting part of an answer a few seconds after they seem to have finished, once they have decided you really want to hear it.

Listen for the detail that does not fit your expectations. If you arrived believing the old market was dying and the stallholder talks happily about a new generation of customers, follow that. Your piece will be better for being surprised, and the person will notice that you were actually listening rather than waiting to confirm what you already thought.

Ask for specifics when an answer drifts towards the general. Can you remember a particular day? or What did that look like? turns a summary into a scene. Scenes are what long-form readers remember.

Taking notes you can trust

Whether you record or write by hand, decide before you start, and ask permission to record. A phone on the table is easy to forget, but it is still a microphone, and people deserve to know it is on. Some will speak more freely without it; respect that and switch to the notebook.

When writing by hand, do not try to capture everything. Get down the exact wording of anything you might quote, mark it clearly as a quote, and note the rest in your own shorthand. Write down what you can see as well: what the person was doing with their hands, what was on the wall behind them, what interrupted you. These details are what let a reader see the conversation, not just hear it.

Then do what we suggest for all first-hand reporting: spend a few minutes with the notes the same day, while you still remember the tone of a remark and the word you could not read. We describe that evening pass, and the rest of the route from notebook to draft, in From Field Notes to a Finished Story.

Consent that lasts beyond the conversation

Agreeing to chat is not the same as agreeing to appear in a published piece, and agreeing to appear is not the same as agreeing to every detail. Before you leave, check how the person wants to be named: full name, first name only, or a description such as a fisherman who has worked this harbour since he was a boy. Check, too, whether anything they said was meant to stay between you.

Take particular care with people who may be more exposed than they realise: anyone talking about their employer, their neighbours, their health, their money or their immigration status. A quote that sounds charming to you might cause trouble for them in a small town where everyone reads the same pages. When in doubt, describe rather than name, or leave the remark out. Our guidelines ask every writer to keep other people’s private lives out of their pages, and an interview is where that rule is most easily forgotten.

If you can, offer a way to get in touch afterwards. You do not have to send people the draft, and many writers prefer not to, but reading a quote back to someone to check the facts is a courtesy that often catches a real mistake.

Representing people fairly on the page

When you draft, the people you met become characters, and characters are easy to flatten. The cheerful café owner, the grumpy old man, the wise local: each of these is a shortcut, and each is unfair to someone who spent their time with you. Give people the complexity they showed you. If the grumpy man was also funny, say so.

Quote accurately and in context. Trimming a quote for length is normal; trimming it so that it means something the speaker did not mean is not. If someone hesitated, contradicted themselves or changed their mind during the conversation, consider whether the reader needs to know that to understand them fairly.

Watch, too, for the balance of voices. If every local in your piece agrees with you, ask whether that is the place or the selection. A long read about a town can hold disagreement, and it is usually richer for it. We look at the wider question of writing honestly about somewhere you were only passing through in Writing About a Place You Visited.

A simple test before you publish: imagine the person reading the piece with their family around them. They may not love every line, but they should recognise themselves, and they should not feel used. If you can picture that moment without wincing, you have done right by them, and by your readers too.