Books — Talk to Me: How to Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers, and Interview Anyone Like a Pro
As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered.
Talk to Me: How to Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers, and Interview Anyone Like a Pro
Dean Nelson, Harper Perennial (2019)
Find the book here. Check out Nelson’s website here.
Being a writer means I have friends who are also writers. Working for years in three different forms means those writer friends are a diverse group. As such, my reading list might seem a little weird to people who are more married to a particular form or expression.
Take, for instance, my friend Dean Nelson. A journalist and one of the best interviewers I’ve met, he and I go back to my teen years and were colleagues in the same department for four years. We are both irreverent and caring in equal measure, which means we are trouble when we find ourselves in the same room.
So, when his book Talk to Me came out the summer of my sabbatical, I was stoked to read it. Ostensibly a primer on how to interview others, I had a suspicion that Dean would be getting at more than just good journalistic practice.
I was not incorrect.
Talk to Me is, of course, a useful professional aid, making plain the ways that one can build or burn even the best interview situations. And, Dean manages to find the proper balance of useful, direct craft advice and interesting anecdotal illustrations that underscore rather than overwhelm the technical information people came for, a balance so many writing guides fail to achieve.
It’s also a sneaky memoir of a guy who’s spent a life learning how to listen, more in the vein of Francis Flaherty’s The Elements of Story than Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. And anyone who knows Dean knows he’s got stories worth being interviewed about himself, stories he opens up on the pages here.
But the book is just as much a reminder that listening with intent rather than speaking with authority is a crucial human skill, one I fear we are losing in our hyper-polarized and self-segregated digital present. In many ways, it’s a call to push past replacing interactions with suppositions to discover what lies beyond our assumptions about others.
“Paradox is always worth exploring, in my opinion, because it shows that human beings are never entirely this way or that way. Every fundamentalist has his caveat. Every liberal has a conservative exception” (25).
And, when confronted with the paradox, Dean’s advice is a very sound endorsement of quelling our knee-jerk need to frame those contradictions by talking over the person in whom we find them. Rather, the real work is maintaining a posture of listening as a form of accountability for both ourselves and others.
“Silence is part of the grammar of an interview….Using silence means you are telling your source that you can wait him out. It tells him that silence isn’t an answer, and he’s not going to get out of answering…” (189, 191).
It’s of note here to recall that meditation is so often silent and the learning it generates paradoxical to the noisy confines of a world of people trying to speak their truth into larger existence. Maybe that’s the message here as well.