Questions that get real answers
Okay. You've got your room set up, your mic in place, your chair positioned so the light's not doing anything weird. Now you actually have to talk to this person. Let's get into questions.
Here's the thing most people get wrong first: they walk in with a list like "Tell me about your childhood" and then wonder why they get two sentences and a shrug. That's not a question. That's a homework assignment, and adults hate those as much as kids do.
Start smaller than feels necessary
Don't open with the big stuff. Don't open with "What was your mother like?" Open with something a person can hold in their hands.
"What was the kitchen like in the house you grew up in?"
"What did you eat for breakfast most days?"
"What was the walk to school like?"
Small, specific, sensory questions get you real answers because they don't ask someone to summarize a whole relationship or a whole decade. They ask for one memory. People can find one memory. It's the summarizing that trips them up and makes them go quiet.
Once they're talking about the kitchen, the mother comes up on her own. She always does. You just have to give her a door to walk through instead of asking someone to describe an entire building from memory.
Follow the thing they said, not the thing on your list
This is the part that's hard to teach and easy to do once you notice it. You'll have your list of questions on a notecard or your phone, and that's fine, keep it. But if your person says something interesting and you just move to the next item on your list, you've missed it. You have to actually follow up.
I ask a lot of "okay but" questions. Okay, but who was in the car with you? Okay, but who filmed that, though? Somebody had a camera in 1962, who was it? Those little side questions are usually where the good stuff lives, not in the big planned question you wrote down beforehand.
If you don't know what to ask next, ask what happened right before that, or right after. That almost always works.
Let the silence sit there
This is the one people struggle with most. Someone finishes an answer, there's a pause, and the instinct is to jump in and fill it with your next question. Don't. Wait. A lot of the best material comes in the ten seconds after someone thinks they're done talking. They'll add the real thing almost as an afterthought, like it wasn't important, and it's usually the most important sentence in the whole interview.
I know it feels awkward on your end. It's not awkward for them. Let it sit.
You will need to correct people sometimes, gently
This part nobody warns you about. People misremember things, and sometimes they misremember them confidently.
I did a project for Teresa a while back and during an interview she was telling me about a photo, dead certain about which sister was standing where. I happened to already know, from other photos I'd cross-referenced, that she had it backwards. So actually, I said, I think that's Linda on the left, not Carol. Teresa pushed back. She was sure. I checked again after, and I was right, and I felt a little bad being right, honestly, because she'd said it with so much confidence and I was the newcomer contradicting her.
But here's why it mattered: if I'd let it go, that caption would've been wrong forever. Once it's in the video, people believe it. Nobody fact-checks a family history video, they just accept it as true. So you do have to correct things, even when it's uncomfortable, even when the person you're interviewing is older than you and has told the story that way for forty years. Do it kindly. "So actually, I think it might have been—" works fine. But do it.
Keep your question list short on paper, long in your head
My opinion, and it's just mine: don't overprepare a script. Write down eight or ten questions, the small specific kind, and then trust yourself to follow the conversation wherever it goes. A long rigid list makes you a person reading questions instead of a person listening to answers, and your interviewee can tell the difference immediately.
One real caution here: if you're covering something you know is painful for this person, a death, a divorce, a hard year, ask about it once, gently, and then let them lead. Don't circle back to it three more times because it wasn't on tape clean enough. Some things you don't need a second take of.
Before next time
Write your list of eight small, specific questions for the person you're planning to interview. Don't write "tell me about," write the kitchen, the breakfast, the walk to school kind of question. We'll record with them next time.