Thursday, June 14, 2012

Interview, much?

As I was perusing the web, nursing a terrible headache, I found an interview done recently with the author John Irving by the Sunday book review in the NY Times. Mr. Irving, in my opinion, was a man of few words. He still writes in longhand, not on a computer as well.


How many times have I had to answer the same questions over and over in interviews through the years? A lot. But do I mind? Not at all. I figure new readers will ask the same questions that the new interviewer is asking, and I do forgive repetition.

Recently, in a group of writers, the question was posed about what the writers thought about interview questions. Whether or not there was one or two that they just simply detested.

I truly couldn't come up with any, but did agree the one that someone posed "where do you get your ideas from" has to be the worst.  Not because it is offensive, but because it is so darn hard to answer. In reality, there is no bad question. All interviews are different, and while some questions seem to be repeated, it is the writer's job to make the answers seem a bit different.

This is especially true if you are doing a book tour and the bulk of your tour is made up of interviews on various blogs.

So, dear Murderers, as I sit here and allow the Ibuprophen to kick in, I wonder, what do you think are good interview questions? What would YOU *if you were interviewing* want to know most?

1 comment:

Aaron Paul Lazar said...

I do sometimes feel a little jaded with the standard questions of "where do you get your ideas" or "how do you find time to write." But it's fine, I'm always happy to answer these questions, even if it's a thousand times. ;o) My favorites have to do with questions about scenes or characters in specific books where folks have read and loved the stories and are dying to know things like "Will Siegfried ever find someone to love?" or "Will Harold get out of prison?" or "Who did you base Maddy on?" Things like that give me great pleasure!