You’ve heard the phrase “hog in, sausage out.”

To get good at getting the goods, conduct three kinds of research:

1. Background research

Before heading to the interview, spend some quality time with your BFFs and research assistants, Google and ChatGPT. You might:

• Define a term. Search for “define:[TERM] in Google. I once found a cochlear implant compared to a bionic ear and was able to use that analogy — though not, obviously, those words — in my article.
• Find a data point. I recently wrote a lead for a client in the utilities business on severe weather using stats I uncovered via ChatGPT. (Of course, you are not a New York lawyer at a court hearing; you will check the facts you get from ChatGPT before using them.)
• Get an explanation. I love HowStuffWorks.com for technical ‘splainers. #BecauseSometimesIDon’tUnderstandEngineers.

This is also a great place to get questions for the interview. My sister asked ChatGPT for questions to ask retailers on a conference panel. The results were nuanced and fascinating.

2. Interview

When you nail down the facts in your background research, you can use the interview to add humanity and detail to the story. Instead of covering the five 5 W’s, look for anecdotes, analogies and compelling quotes.

Ask questions that get to:

• Story. Ask “when” questions that go to moments of pain, moments of change, moments of crisis and moments of decision. That’s where the stories are.
• Examples. For a blog post on how to get rich slowly, I found all the information I needed online. So I was able to devote the interview to getting examples. I left with stories of a college dropout who started a software company, married teachers who lived on his paycheck and invested hers, and more.
• Color. “Get the name of the dog,” says the Poynter Institute’s Roy Peter Clark. Use the interview to make sure you can name names and number numbers.

3. Observational research

Try WBHA, or writing by hanging around. Being there adds color and detail to your message. So go to the scene and observe.

• Ask for a demo. One of my students was writing a post about an autistic adult who was the top salesperson at his company. I suggested she ask him to sell to her via Zoom.
• Go someplace. I once joined a billionaire for lunch in his company’s cafeteria. He ate a brown-bag peanut-butter sandwich while I, a non-billionaire, paid for cafeteria food.
• Be on hand. My team got to observe a cochlear-implant surgery for a health system blog post. We saw a father and daughter hear each other say “I love you” for the first time in decades.

Get good at getting the goods.

“Without great reporting, a story is like one big comb-over,” writes Ann Hull, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Washington Post. “You can see it from the third paragraph.”

Make sure your message can’t be compared to a comb-over. Get good at research and information gathering.

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Sometimes you’ll find a metaphor in an interview. Other times, it’s up to you to create one yourself.

When you find yourself in that situation, try my four-part Metaphor Generator:

Here’s how it works:

1. Jot down the unfamiliar item.

This is the concept you plan to compare. For one group of agricultural writers, that concept was “genetic mapping.”

2. Note the key attribute.

What is it about the unfamiliar topic that you want audience members to understand? In the case of the agricultural writers, the key attribute was that genetic mapping helps ranchers predict the future.

The more tangible and colloquial your key attribute is, the easier it will be to …

3. List familiar items that share the key attribute.

For “predict the future,” for instance, the list might include:

The more concrete and specific these familiar items are, the better the metaphor. For instance: “Dionne Warwick,” “1-800-PSYCHIC” and “Miss Cleo” will all yield better metaphors than “psychic.”

Keep pushing — the more items you list at this step, the more interesting and sophisticated the resulting metaphor will be. Brainstorming in a group might help: More heads are better than one on this step.

4. Craft a metaphor.

Connect the unfamiliar item to the familiar item by means of the key attribute they both share.

Then craft your metaphor with my Metaphor Template.

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I still remember — more than a decade later — one of the thousand heartbreaking stories about Hurricane Katrina victims, an AP report about the Superdome evacuation:

As powerful as that story is — the poor child cried until he vomited, for gosh sakes — the two most wrenching words are “Snowball, Snowball.”

Why? Because details drive stories.

As The Poynter Institute’s editorial guru Roy Peter Clark counsels:

“Get the name of the dog.”

Three ways to conduct a good interview

Sure, there’s a place for open-ended questions in your interview process. But good stories also require specific, tangible detail. So ask specific questions. Make sure the interview subject names names and numbers numbers.

1. Get the name of the dog.

Clark writes:

So “get the name of the dog, the brand of the beer, the color and make of the sports car,” Clark counsels.

William H. Broad named names when writing about the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in an article about how engineers use disasters to learn to improve structures:

Poor Tubby.

Notice how “black cocker spaniel” is more effective than “dog” and how “Tubby” is more effective than “black cocker spaniel” alone.

The other day, I was working with communicators at a financial services organization on their content marketing pieces. For a story on the organization’s financial camps for kids, they’d written:

Pretty abstract; pretty dull. I encouraged them to find a concrete detail to liven things up.

What have your kids done when they were bored? I asked. And from the back of the room, one communicator yelled out:

“They painted the schnauzer.”

Oh, I think we have a lead, I said. What color did they paint him? The communicator answered:

“They used Pepto-Bismol.”

Oh, I know we have a lead.

Just one more thing … What’s the name of the dog?

Frisky.

Make sure your list of questions includes those that go to concrete detail. That’s more important than whether you use a recording device.

2. Ask ‘What’s it like?’

Sometimes, all you need to do to get a comparison is to ask. The question to ask to get a metaphor is “What’s it like?”

That’s the approach Roger von Oech, author of A Whack on the Side of the Head, recommends. His workshop participants ask: “What’s it like?” to create metaphors for the meaning of life.

Two of my favorites:

“Life is like an unassembled abacus. It’s what you make of it that counts.”

“Life is like a maze in which you try to avoid the exit.”

What’s popcorn like?

In my storytelling workshops, participants practice “The Popcorn Project,” where they explain popcorn in part by asking “What’s it like?” Some of the images:

Caramel popcorn is like “honey sliding off a ski slope.”

Stale popcorn smells “like it’s been sitting under a table in a pre-school for 40 years.”

Make sure your interview questions include ‘What’s it like?”

Your subject matter expert may be able to answer this question for you. One good question to ask in the interview is:

“If you were explaining this concept to a class of third graders, what would you say it was like?”

3. Ask the subject to set the scene.

So you weren’t lucky enough to be there when the story unfolded? Ask your subject matter experts to set the scene.

• Start with questions that get to description: “What was the weather like?” “Were you wearing a coat?”
• Take the subject matter expert through a timeline. Ask, “What happened next?” “What happened after that?”
• Switch to the present tense to put the source in the scene: “What are you doing now?”

One technique for fleshing out a story during an interview is to take the subject to the scene of the story and ask her to show you what happened.

I suspect that’s the approach the writer used for this passage, from a story from AMD Advances, the marketing magazine of Advanced Micro Devices:

Scene-setting is one way communicators at AMD Advances do the seemingly impossible: They make technology compelling and understandable through storytelling. As Managing Editor Daniel Koga writes:

“By showing the human side of the high-tech industry, we … convey AMD’s emphasis on customer support and being a company that touts its people as much as its technology.”

men.

Questions and answers

Concepts are great, but concrete details, metaphors and scene setting make or break a story. Make sure you plan to spend part of the interview getting these golden nuggets.

____

Source: Roy Peter Clark, The American Conversation and the Language of Journalism, The Poynter Institute for Media Studies (St. Petersburg, Fla.), 1994

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Call it an aha! moment:

Aha! moments — aka moments of truth or desk-pounding moments — like this one, from an Eastman Chemical Company annual report, form the core of every corporate story.

Here are four ways to find the aha! moment that’s the gateway to compelling stories.

1. Find the ‘desk-pounding moment.’

When you’re looking for stories, ask the interview subject for the “desk-pounding moment.”

That, according to David Murray, executive director of the Professional Speechwriters Association, “is the moment when somebody pounded on his or her desk and said, ‘Damn it, we’ve got to do something about this.’”

That’s the secret to corporate storytelling.

“That moment is the origin of every corporate program,” Murray says. “The closer you as a reporter get to the very moment the idea was hatched by a human being, the better your story is going to be.”

The moment of invention often makes for a great story. Nike, for instance, began, according to Nikebiz.com …

Looking for a brand story that sells your product or service better than facts and figures? Include in your list of questions when the company began, the sole was invented, the theory discovered. The moment of inception illustrates your organization’s creativity, innovation and vision.

And it can make a terrific — and telling — desk-pounding moment.

2. Ask When questions.

Good stories cover one moment in time. So if you’re looking for a story that connects, ask when questions.

When questions take content experts back to a specific time, a specific place — and, often, a specific story. So try asking “when” questions.

Include interview questions that focus on:

• Moments of pain
• Moments of change
• Moments of crisis
• Moments of decision

These key moments are times that caused your subject matter expert to change course. That’s where the stories are.

A writer once asked Kansas City architect Cary Goodman when he knew he would join his profession. He told her about the time he built a fabulous tree house at the age of 9. His construction was so great that the local paper sent a photographer to shoot it. The photo made the front page.

No doubt about it: When questions are good questions. Whether you’re interviewing on the phone or face-to-face, a successful interview starts with prepared questions that get to stories.

3. Pass the 30-second test.

How do you know whether yours is a moment of truth or just something that happened?

Pass the 30-second test: When you research a moment of truth, make sure the original event didn’t take more than 30 seconds.

In an Esquire profile of Robert Redford, the writer tells about being frustrated by the actor’s incredible need for privacy. In the interviews, he was guarded and wouldn’t share any personal information.

To sum up this attribute, the writer ends with an anecdote about two fans who see the movie star at a New York City intersection:

Light changes; woman sprints over to Redford; asks if it’s really him; he replies.

Thirty seconds. That’s a good anecdote.

So while you’ll ask open-ended questions to elicit quotes and ideas, a good interview also includes questions to get to stories.

4. Make sure it’s a moment.

Self magazine asks for moments of truth in a series of stories about readers who shed pounds and shaped up. Here’s one of them:

Open email, see second chin, sign up for Noom. Thirty seconds. Good anecdote.

But what about this one?

That’s not a moment of truth, it’s a state of mind. The key phrase here is “I used to think.” This is something that happened over time, not once.

However, sometimes you can transform a state of mind into a moment of truth. If it happened several times, I always say, it also happened once. So choose on of those times and focus on that:

Kids ask Mom to push them in the swing; she thinks, “I can’t!”; realizes she’s got to make a lifestyle change.

Make it a story.

Storytelling has the power to engage, influence and inspire, according to the Harvard Business Review. If you want to move readers to act in the business world, create content and marketing campaigns that share your organization’s aha! moments.

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