Story Telling Crash Course - Session Eleven: The Question / Response (Interview) Approach


In a rather serendipitous flow of events, the eleventh session of the story telling crash course, the one about interviews, happens exactly today. Why is this serendipitous? Well, because today is also the first day of the d10e conference in Bucharest, which is, inherently, an event where you can meet a lot of people, from whom, obviously, you can get a lot of interesting responses.

If only you would ask the right questions, that is.

The conference will start in a few hours, an hopefully I would meet some interesting peeps, ask some not very dumb questions and get some interesting answers, that I could share here afterwards. Until then, let's focus on the interviews and why are they good for your story telling skills.

For starters, they are a great tool for exercising your dialogue technique. Since the interaction is real, not imaginary, you get a lot of learning material about how people actually talk to each other. So if you're practicing story telling for fiction writing, then definitely do at least one interview per month, possibly live, just to keep yourself from rusting.

And second, if you're practicing story telling for blogging (which I assume most of you are) then interviews are a very, very good source of traffic. Fortunately, I have the perfect example inside the Steemit ecosystem: it's @wadepaterson, the guy who actually brought me here, by inviting me to answer to one of his famous sets of "20 questions". Wade does pretty much only that in Steemit, he is the "20 questions"guy and, so far, this worked well for him. So if you want to get a little bit of inspiration for your assignment, I kindly invite you to read some of his interviews.

Now, about your assignment. This will be tricky. I invite you to do a real interview with a real Steemian. Might be somebody who you already know, or somebody new. Just reach to that person, prepare a battery of 5 relevant questions and go ahead. One thing that could come in handy is the Steemit.chat site, where a lot of Steemians are hanging out. My suggestion would be to use the chat for your questions, it's much faster than email, or, God forbid, than the Steemit internal messaging tool.

I will personally review all the interviews and I will award the one I like the most with the symbolic prize of 1SBD. Don't forget to tag your posts with challenge30 and story. If you could leave a comment with the link to your interview, that would be even better.

Looking forward to read your stories!

Links to previous sessions:

  1. Story Telling Crash Course - Session One: Anchoring Techniques - Personal Stories
  2. Story Telling Crash Course - Session Two: Anchoring Techniques - Quotes
  3. Story Telling Crash Course - Session Three: Anchoring Techniques - Research
  4. Story Telling Crash Course - Session Four: Master the Listicle Particle
  5. Story Telling Crash Course - Session Five: Define and Create Palatable Text
  6. Story Telling Crash Course - Session Six: Perspective Games
  7. Story Telling Crash Course - Session Seven: Meaningful Detours
  8. Story Telling Crash Course - Session Eight: Form Constraints - Write Only 3 Sentences Per Paragraph
  9. Story Telling Crash Course - Session Nine: Form Constraints: Write Maximum 10 Words per Sentence
  10. Story Telling Crash Course - Session Ten: More Constraints: Write Without Using Negations

I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.


Dragos Roua


You can also vote for me as a Steemit witness here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses

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