Ask and ye shall receive
A question is just the first step to the end of a story
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was sitting in class with fellow grad students.
We’d just finished a video conference call with the nonfiction writer Gabrielle Burton (Searching for Tamsen Donner—read it! You’ll love it!) and were dissecting the conversation. At one point, someone voiced the anxiety they had prior to the call.
“I wasn’t sure what to ask her,” they said.
“I knew Sarah would think of an interesting question,” was how my teacher responded.
The compliment stunned me because I had also come to class completely unprepared and unsure what to ask. But the simple truth was I was the main question-asked for the whole call. It wasn’t something I thought of as a particular skill, but apparently, I did it very well.
And the truth is that over the course of my life and career, people notice me questions and their consequences.
When I worked as a freelance journalist, I received an email from a club manager. It said: “Your article was the first one that got the quotes exactly right. They weren’t taken out of context.” That’s because all my questions had gotten exactly what I needed; I didn’t need to change her language at all.
There was that time I came onto a project for a Fortune 500 company, and my main supervisor was concerned because everyone else had 7 years of experience on the thing.
“No worries,” I said. “Let me read over everything, and I’ll come back with questions.” Those questions became the team’s questions and fueled the entire project. I easily stepped into a leadership role through them.
It’s really just a common occurrence that I complete kick-off meeting, interviews, workshops, or any interaction where a client, a stakeholder, a person will say something along the lines of “No one has ever asked us questions like this” OR “That’s not a question I expected.” And it’s all to the benefit of my future work because it engenders trust and confidence in my process—even if they don’t understand what the outcome will be.
Or there was the time, I only had 1 hour to interview 10 trustees of a major architectural landmark. I decided to only ask the group one question. And when we left the meeting an hour later, my agency founder turned to me in a panic and said, “That was amazing! I hope someone taped that!”
You know the what energy source is of all that?
My writer brain.
We can find a good story in anything and anywhere.
Because of that, we’re just super interested in learning about whatever is in front of us—person, project, place, product, problem, etc.
We approach discovery like a story in itself. We, the writer, are on a journey from ignorance to expertise. What will we learn in the process? How will it transform us? What would we want to know? And we’re not just looking for the obvious stuff. We’re looking for the deep, rich veins that the interview subject doesn’t always articulate. Or as my playwright teacher once said: “What if everyone’s most vulnerable secret was just in their pocket?”
Once we we have it in hand, then it becomes ours to disseminate and create with—into any format, medium, genre, expressive medium. And that’s when we start spinning out that story across others … becoming what Sarah Doody calls the product storyteller or the bard, the translator, the expressionist of the internal knowledge that was trapped inside the head or heads of all the people.
That’s how you learn how to ask amazing questions that leave the people you interview transformed and reshape the things that you plan to make for yourself and others.
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