The Writer's Studio: Interviewing for Story

The Writer’s Studio is a free workshop series open to all students from all majors. Come study the art of writing in intensive, fun, hands-on workshops with dynamic faculty from the Creative Writing program, the Stanford Storytelling Project, and others. You’ll leave with an expanded understanding of what your writing can do.

Interviewing for Story Many of today's most impactful, award-winning stories are built around interviews. Consider not only documentary-driven stories such as Serial or S-Town but also novels such as Dave Eggers' What is the What, or novelistic journalism like Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, or Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, or the plays of Anna Deavere Smith. Interviewing is a great way to discover, build, or just do background research about a story, and it can help you create rich characters, bring new depth to a story, or develop dimensions you hadn't considered in your wildest imagination. In this workshop, we'll look at texts based on interviews (novels, reporting, sound storytelling) and explore how the writer or producer might have elicited the material, and then examine the art of preparing for conducting an interview. We'll consider strategies for eliciting story, creating intimacy and rapport, and focusing your interview questions to get the content you're looking for. You'll leave the workshop with interviewing strategies and prepared questions for an interview, whether it's a dream/imagined interview or an upcoming one.Jenny March is an audio documentary producer and community-builder and works at the Stanford Storytelling Project as a senior producer and program associate. She particularly loves exploring the human experience through intimate, non-narrated audio portraits. She has taught audio courses at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and will offer "Introduction to Podcast Storytelling" this spring at Stanford. She is also the co-producer of Audio Under the Stars, a summer-long outdoor audio festival in Durham, NC.