Story Telling Crash Course - Session Eleven: The Question / Response (Interview) Approach

dragosroua (74)in #challenge30 • 7 years ago (edited)

In a rather serendipitous flow of events, the eleventh session of the story telling crash course, the one about interviews, happens exactly today. Why is this serendipitous? Well, because today is also the first day of the d10e conference in Bucharest, which is, inherently, an event where you can meet a lot of people, from whom, obviously, you can get a lot of interesting responses.

If only you would ask the right questions, that is.

The conference will start in a few hours, an hopefully I would meet some interesting peeps, ask some not very dumb questions and get some interesting answers, that I could share here afterwards. Until then, let's focus on the interviews and why are they good for your story telling skills.

For starters, they are a great tool for exercising your dialogue technique. Since the interaction is real, not imaginary, you get a lot of learning material about how people actually talk to each other. So if you're practicing story telling for fiction writing, then definitely do at least one interview per month, possibly live, just to keep yourself from rusting.

And second, if you're practicing story telling for blogging (which I assume most of you are) then interviews are a very, very good source of traffic. Fortunately, I have the perfect example inside the Steemit ecosystem: it's @wadepaterson, the guy who actually brought me here, by inviting me to answer to one of his famous sets of "20 questions". Wade does pretty much only that in Steemit, he is the "20 questions"guy and, so far, this worked well for him. So if you want to get a little bit of inspiration for your assignment, I kindly invite you to read some of his interviews.

Now, about your assignment. This will be tricky. I invite you to do a real interview with a real Steemian. Might be somebody who you already know, or somebody new. Just reach to that person, prepare a battery of 5 relevant questions and go ahead. One thing that could come in handy is the Steemit.chat site, where a lot of Steemians are hanging out. My suggestion would be to use the chat for your questions, it's much faster than email, or, God forbid, than the Steemit internal messaging tool.

I will personally review all the interviews and I will award the one I like the most with the symbolic prize of 1SBD. Don't forget to tag your posts with challenge30 and story. If you could leave a comment with the link to your interview, that would be even better.

Looking forward to read your stories!

Links to previous sessions:

I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

You can also vote for me as a Steemit witness here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses

#story #writing #minnowsunite

7 years ago in #challenge30 by dragosroua (74)

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eric-boucher (68) 7 years ago

I thought your original question, "Why is this serendipitous?", was going to be answered by @wadepaterson "20 Questions" famous posts... He had such a great post about his coming interview this week... I only had to wait a few more lines to see him mentioned a bit father! Good to see his name underlined here too. Thank you!

I really LOVE how you also underline and point at the fact that questions contain inherent potency which directs the potential potency of an answer. I often like to use the rule of three when it comes to questioning, especially in a live situation where someone is on the spot and has to answer something. Unfortunately, this usually seems to be putting pressure on the individuals... So, I ask the question, sometimes exactly the same question, or rephrase it in other ways three times in a row simply by adding up a why at the end of the person's answer. One usually ends up with a real gold nugget of na answer this way.

As I studied in philosophy, asking the right question and understanding the underlying concepts behind it, helps one exposing the answers. As you pointed out so precisely "If only you would ask the right questions,(...)".

Thanks for the contest, though I can't seem to have access to the steemit.chat this is a valuable contest to which I look forward to read the questions & answers as well getting to know our community better and, therefore, aspects of our inherent potential as a community in all its diversity.

All for one and one for all! Namaste :)

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