Add some offbeat to your QUESTIONS Want to know more about me? Go ahead. Ask me anything. Ask me where I went to school. Ask my age. Ask where I live. Ask about my family. Routine questions? Yep. Routine answers? Probably. Sure, they’re all basic questions that have merit. But remember the opening question? No, not the one about where I went to school. The first question: Want to know more about me? When you’re writing a profile, it’s all about peeling back the surface layers (ie. beyond those routine questions and answers about age, employment, family, hobbies) and getting to know more about what drives a person’s personality. When we do this, we’re investing in a person’s character. We’re committing ourselves to give readers more by giving them the opportunity to get to know a person. The ultimate compliment for any profile is having a reader remark, “I feel as though I’ve gotten to know this person” after reading your story. Readers don’t get to “know” a person when we report only age, occupation, home town, etc. We’re not reporting to fill out a bank form to open a new account – a process we all know is boring and time consuming. You need more. Think back to high school. We discovered more about a person’s personality by reading a yearbook. Plenty could be crammed into that 30-word blurb next to your graduation photo. OK, back then I had hair (lots of it!), worshipped Van Halen and dreamed of being a rock star (hey, at least I didn’t write marine biologist). It didn’t quite work out. Today, I’m in the newspaper business, minus some hair, and more apt to listen to some flamenco guitarist named Obo when I’m not playing a Metallica CD. There you go. In about 60 words or less, you’ve learned more about me than the basics. Let’s bring us to today. Again, the aim is to discover more about personality. Peel back the layers. Once you develop several layers, you can construct a whole onion (I’ve heard of the onion analogy many times before, and will borrow it here, but it sounds better suited to a tearjerker to me). My preferred approach is what I call The QUOTE (Questions Unmistakably Offbeat They’re Effective) Approach. Throw some QUOTE at your subject and they might give you a gem that you can grow into something more with followup questions. The QUOTE Approach is effective because it involves questions where the answers can’t be rehearsed beforehand. Your subject will have to look to his/her inner self to answer. It may take a minute. There may be silence for an extended period. That’s OK. That’s exactly what we want. We want the subject to dig deep for an answer. Still not convinced? Go ahead. Throw a QUOTE at me. If I could have dinner with anyone, living or dead, who would it be? Well, let me think. . . . . Sitting Bull, the great Sioux chief. Why? Well, we’ll leave that for followup questions. Still, you have something to work with. You can grow the person’s answers by asking followup questions about why such a famous person influences the individual’s life, or what qualities the person tries to emulate. Try the dinner question on a source. You might be surprised by the answer. Obviously, I’m not suggesting you throw QUOTE in every interview. Pick the time and the subject. Last month I suggested to reporter Tiffany Mayer that she ask Canada’s Minister of Agriculture: If you could be one animal, what would it be? Mayer laughed. But when she tried it, she was surprised he answered it. And what an enlightened answer from a man who was dealing with the Asian bird flu crisis and the slaughtering of thousands of chickens in Western Canada. Develop a whole list of QUOTE questions that you can keep handy. The possibilities are endless. Yes, as journalists, we need to be serious and professional. But we also need to put our subjects at ease . . . and become candid. Think QUOTE. 10 Questions
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