Think about people whom you know personally or know of. Who has interesting stories to tell? A grandmother who worked on the line at the Ford plant in 1942 bolting bumpers to cars? Your friend’s older sister who’s trying to break into the music business in New York? The cook at a diner where you and your friends have eaten at hundreds of times?

Be careful about interviewing people you already know very well — much of your conversation may involve inside jokes and references that your eventual readers will not understand.

Do some background research about the person you’re interviewing. This can help you better understand him or her and be useful in coming up with interview questions. The exact process for background research depends on the people involved. Your basic goal is to find out more about the person and his or her history. If the person is involved with an organization, you might start by finding information about the organization — its history, who is involved with it, what its goals are. If you know that the person has interests, hobbies, or other activities, find out what you can about those things.

Talk to other people who know your interviewee — but avoid seeming creepy about it. You may want to avoid doing too much of this sort of “background check” conversation with other people since word about your inquiries may get back to the interviewee, who may feel uncomfortable with people talking about him or her in this manner. See the Tip Box in Chapter 7 for some additional considerations.

Use the information you’ve gathered from your background research to help you develop questions and topics of discussion for the interview. What questions did your research leave unanswered? What would you like to find out more about?

Your raw notes and recordings from the interview are just that — raw material. You’ll be picking and choosing material to create an interesting picture for your own readers or viewers. If you’re working on a “creative nonfiction” type of interview, your primary goal is entertainment. Flag the portions of the interview that seem most interesting and entertaining — they could be funny, emotional, inspirational, or suspenseful.

If your goal is entertainment, you’ll want to construct the profile like a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. You don’t want to put the most interesting material at the start (because everything will be downhill after that). Instead, you’ll usually want to provide some glimpses of what’s coming up or some moderately interesting material at the start. You may also decide to provide the general background information in your own words, very quickly, at the start of the piece.

If you choose to lay out your article, look at other profiles on the web or in print magazines. Analyze how designers have used a grid to structure the page, how they’ve varied font sizes for headings. Do the layouts you see use pictures? Of what? Do they use “pull quotes” (short quotations from the article to generate interest to readers who are skimming)? How is color used?