Radio Interviewing Tips: Creating Mystery and Magic Out of Everyday Topics

Radio Interviewing Tips: Creating Mystery and Magic Out of Everyday Topics

I miss mystery and magic. I miss kids making toys out of dirt and leaves and twigs. I miss being read to at night before sleep. I miss sitting around a fire hearing long rambling stories with surprise endings. I want more time and less pressure. I want to understand more and talk less.

A radio interview gives you all the space in your imagination for musing about the past–but not all the time. On the radio you can spin a yarn, but you sure won’t get enough time to knit an entire sweater or even finish the thumb on a mitten. But you can maximize your time by telling stories that intrigue and leave enough out so your audience wants more.

1. Say what you’re not going to tell.

I was listening to NPR commentator, teacher and writer Reynolds Price talk about his transition from walking person to paraplegic on Terry Gross’ NPR show “Fresh Air.” When she asked him what he had to give up he answered her first by telling her what he wasn’t going to tell her. I was all ears.

He said he was going to say one thing, but after he said his one thing he wasn’t going to say any more about it. In other words he was defining his limits in no uncertain terms. And he did it in such a way as to make it final. His one thing: When he became paraplegic he gave up sex–because he had to–physically. End of story. This was the only point in the interview when he became quietly serious. You knew that this one thing was a hardship for him. He spoke of many joys, but the lack of the physical affection that he knew in his old life pained him. It was obvious in the not-telling.

2. Don’t take serious matters too seriously.

Reynolds Price discussed the two visions he had during his lifetime and their impact on the way he lives his life now at age 72. Visions are a touchy subject for anyone. But Price made the profound both mysterious and funny. His second vision was about twenty years ago, right before he had the radiation treatments that paralyzed his legs. He and Jesus were in a body of water and Jesus was pouring water on the scar on his spine. He told him his sins were forgiven. Price asked him, “But am I healed?” Jesus said, “That too.” In spite of this vision and Jesus’ proclamation Price opted for radiation treatment anyway–which made his legs useless. Why? “I don’t know.” Later he said that his affliction made him feel chosen. Aren’t people unfathomable? Doesn’t it make you wonder?

3. Surprise yourself by doing.

It’s one thing to think of soundbites to say, another to practice them out loud by yourself, still another to practice with a soundbite buddy, and different still to actually do a radio interview.

Kathan Brown, author of “Ink, Paper, Metal, Wood,” says of the artist Wayne Thiebaud, “I learned from Thiebaud that artists are in lifelong pursuit of ‘it”, one baby step at a time. Lightning bolts seldom come down from the sky, he said, but one thing does lead to another, so ideas recur, and changing anything changes everything. In a 1987 lecture Thiebaud told his audience that printmaking has made ‘an important difference’ in his ‘inquiry into how form evolves.” Making a print, he said, is ‘an orchestration between what you think you know and what you’re surprised to learn.”

4. Speak of now.

O.K. I train people to hone their soundbites, their stories, their anecdotes down from a beanfield to a bean. But I love the sun that warmed the beanfield, the beanfield itself and the road that lead to it. But once you’ve honed the beanfield into beans and spoken about the beans in every context possible you’re now free to speak of all the things that surround the beans.

Once you become fluid in your soundbites you no longer need to adhere to them. You can take an event from your life that happened today and transform it into a soundbite bean that has a new context. That is the beauty of learning all the different formats for soundbites until they resonate in your bones.

In the movie Akeelah and the Bee, Akeelah, the girl studying to win the national spelling bee title learns all the derivations of the words she needs to spell. During the Bee when she hears an unfamiliar word she asks, “What is the derivation?” She has the clues to spell it correctly once she knows if it’s Latin, Greek, German, Italian etc. because she knows how words from all of these places are constructed. Then if she is still unsure she may ask for a definition of it’s meaning, too. So she has all the information she needs to give an intelligent (and hopefully correct) spelling.

Understanding word derivation stops the bee from being an auditory guessing game. Same with soundbites. Once you understand their construction you can create them on the spot. Like studying for a spelling bee this comes from days, weeks, months, years of diligent practice–typically with a partner.