What Makes a Good Life-Story Interview?

Everything here comes from how oral historians and documentary interviewers actually work. It applies whether you are recording your father with a phone on the kitchen table or reading this out of curiosity.

The funnel: concrete before abstract

Every good interview narrows from the physical to the meaningful, and never the other way round. Start with things that can be seen and touched: a house, a room, a walk to school, a machine, a car. Only once somebody is well inside a memory do the larger questions become answerable.

Ask “what did you learn from your father?” cold and you get a sentence. Ask it after forty minutes about his workshop and you get the truth.

Ask how it worked, not how it felt

The most useful technique on this page. “What was it like?” is a request for a summary, and people summarise badly. “What did you actually do?” is a request for a sequence, and people narrate sequences beautifully.

The emotional content still arrives - it simply arrives in the middle of the process answer, unasked for, where it is far more truthful than any direct answer would have been. This is especially true of people, often men of a certain generation, who have no practice at being asked how they feel and considerable practice at explaining how a job was done.

The five-second silence

When somebody stops talking, count to five before you say anything. This is genuinely difficult and it is where most of the best material in any interview comes from.

A pause after an answer is usually not the end of the answer. It is somebody deciding whether to say the next part. Fill it with your next question and you have taken the decision away from them.

The follow-up is the interview

Prepared questions are scaffolding. What produces a story is what you ask about the answer. Four follow-ups do most of the work:

• “What do you mean by that?” - on any throwaway phrase.
• “Who else was there?” - turns events into people.
• “What happened next?” - most people stop one beat early.
• “Can you describe it?” - puts the furniture back in the room.

Notice that none of them require you to know anything about the subject. Curiosity and attention are the whole qualification.

Never correct, never compete

Two ways an amateur interviewer ends a session without meaning to.

Correcting. The date is wrong, the name is wrong, you have heard the story differently. Let it stand. You are recording their account, not adjudicating it - and being corrected makes people cautious for the rest of the afternoon.

Competing. Responding to a story with one of your own. It is conversationally normal and it is fatal in an interview: it signals that their turn is over. Say “what happened next?” instead.

One question at a time

Nervous interviewers stack questions - “what was the house like, and did you have your own room, and who else lived there?” People answer the last one and the first two are gone for good. Ask one thing. Wait.

How to end a session

Stop while it is still going well. An interview that runs until everyone is exhausted is an interview that does not get a sequel, and the sequel is where the good material lives.

Finish with two questions: “what should I have asked you that I did not?” - which frequently produces the best answer of the day - and “what shall we talk about next time?”, which turns a session into a series.

When a memory is difficult

It will happen, and it is not a failure. Do not rush to comfort or to change the subject; both communicate that the subject is unwelcome. Stay quiet, let it be, and then ask something adjacent and concrete.

Offer the choice explicitly - “we can leave that” - and mean it. Somebody who knows they can stop will usually keep going.