Tips to Write an Interview Story Featuring a Person or an Event

1. Observation: You need to open your eyes, ears, and nose for details that will enhance the portrayal of the person being interviewed.

2.Details: You do not have to put everything you hear or observe into the story, but select details that best bring the subject, and the subject's surroundings, to life for the reader.

3. Preparation: Prepare your questions for the interview.

4. Information: Woven into the story are background and descriptions, but they are not the story. The story is what the subject has revealed about himself or herself, or in in neighborhood project, the change in your community. While on one level, the interview story maybe entertaining or fascinating close-up of someone or a place in your neighborhood, it is still, basically information about the person or the place.

5. Description: Show, don't tell.  The temptation to describe a person as friendly, a room as messy should be fought. The weapons- an observant eye, a keen ear, well-chosen details, a broad vocabulary, second to the subject's quotes, descriptive passages are what give life to an interview story.

6. Quotes: Quotes are the highlights of feature interviews. What the interviewee says will be what readers most remember.

7.Insight: In the story, you want to give your readers a revealing look at your neighborhood, or the interviewee's character, thought and feelings.

8. Writing style: An interview, in most cases, is written in the third person and is free of your opinions. The writings maybe seems to be relaxed, casual and conversational , but looked at closely, it is objective in its portrayal of what transpired during the interview.

9. Structure:A neatly flowing story in which background, description, and quotes are interwoven should be constructed  from notes taken during the interview that may last for hours and followed by the complete writing process.

10.Encounter: An interview story should make the reader feel in the end that she/he has personally met the interviewee, and s/he has been up close to him/her.

11. Opening: Think of the reader's entrance to a news story as a front door, a window, a chimney, a back door. A interview story rarely begins with a quotation. Inserted, you can set the scene to involve your reader in the story that is about to be unraveled.

12. Closing: The most common way to end an interview story is to close it with a quotation from thei nterviewee. The readers left hearing his/her voice. Save a good quotation for the end, which means structuring the story so that the final quote falls logically into place right there at the end.