DAVID BARRIE
Wednesday, 31st March 2010. On being interviewed.
I was interviewed some time ago by Sue Magee, one of the driving forces behind The Bookbag, which is one of the crowd-sourced sites for book enthusiasts which are readjusting the balance of power within the market for popular fiction. You can read the interview here (I take my hat off to Sue for the question, regarding all the lingerie in Wasp-Waisted: “How did you acquire this knowledge and, er, was it fun doing it?”).
It was an email interview – I received a list of questions and sent back my answers. This could be seen as a form of cheating: no cut-and-thrust, no sneaky questions to back me up against a wall, and no embarrassing revelations. In my former incarnation as a partner with KPMG I used to be interviewed quite regularly by business or trade journalists on subjects on which I was supposedly an expert (risk management in political campaigns, use of collaborative technologies within large corporations, the impacts of e-government on local authorities, and so on; needless to say, I never refused an interview request, no matter how ill-informed I might have been on the subject; journalists need copy and consultants need publicity). These took place face-to-face or by telephone and I was always a little disheartened by what ended up in print, partly because it always sounded as if I was spouting off banalities (which may well have been the case), and partly because I always sounded brisk and uncouth (which is not how I like to think of myself).
The great advantage of the email interview is that it gives you time to gather your thoughts and express them as well as you can. We’re not all Samuel Johnson, able to rattle off a pithy aphorism or well-rounded sentence as easily as we can snap our fingers, so most of us benefit enormously from being able to recast our pronouncements. It might not work in politics (where written statements tend to be as vacuous as instant soundbites), but if we’re asking folk to invest some time in reading the results of an exchange, it makes sense to polish it up a little. Everyone needs an editor, even if that editor is only oneself.
I was interviewed some time ago by Sue Magee, one of the driving forces behind The Bookbag, which is one of the crowd-sourced sites for book enthusiasts which are readjusting the balance of power within the market for popular fiction. You can read the interview here (I take my hat off to Sue for the question, regarding all the lingerie in Wasp-Waisted: “How did you acquire this knowledge and, er, was it fun doing it?”).
It was an email interview – I received a list of questions and sent back my answers. This could be seen as a form of cheating: no cut-and-thrust, no sneaky questions to back me up against a wall, and no embarrassing revelations. In my former incarnation as a partner with KPMG I used to be interviewed quite regularly by business or trade journalists on subjects on which I was supposedly an expert (risk management in political campaigns, use of collaborative technologies within large corporations, the impacts of e-government on local authorities, and so on; needless to say, I never refused an interview request, no matter how ill-informed I might have been on the subject; journalists need copy and consultants need publicity). These took place face-to-face or by telephone and I was always a little disheartened by what ended up in print, partly because it always sounded as if I was spouting off banalities (which may well have been the case), and partly because I always sounded brisk and uncouth (which is not how I like to think of myself).
The great advantage of the email interview is that it gives you time to gather your thoughts and express them as well as you can. We’re not all Samuel Johnson, able to rattle off a pithy aphorism or well-rounded sentence as easily as we can snap our fingers, so most of us benefit enormously from being able to recast our pronouncements. It might not work in politics (where written statements tend to be as vacuous as instant soundbites), but if we’re asking folk to invest some time in reading the results of an exchange, it makes sense to polish it up a little. Everyone needs an editor, even if that editor is only oneself.