Why the right sort of question gives you the right kind of answer
A masterclass from the late Larry King
Larry King died on January 23. There’s been quite a lot of stuff since about the contribution the CNN host made to the art of interviewing. One headline ran: Larry King's long run made the case that there's no such thing as a dumb question. I think it was meant as praise: if so, it was praise so faint as to be invisible to the naked eye.
But if you want to know how good someone is at a job, ask someone who does the same job.
Here’s what another interviewer, the British radio host Simon Mayo, said a couple of years back:
I ask rambly questions – everybody does. And I wish that I didn’t. Particularly in radio, you hear it in a lot of people where they try and show how much they know about a subject by putting it all into the question.
Larry King, when he was on CNN, asked the shortest questions. Genius. They’re very unsettling.
Mayo is one of the best in the business. In truth, he rarely rambles. He has to get interesting answers out of Hollywood celebrities. That isn’t easy. Listen to what he does. He never puts too much in, be it too much knowledge or too much of himself.
Knowing when to leave things out. It’s one of the two fundamental skills in any creative process. You might think the other one – choosing what to put in – is the more important. It isn’t. The editor has to co-exist with the writer, the pen with the knife,.
We’ll come back to this subject in a future blog. But for now, let’s keep thinking about the art of interviewing.
When we’re asking questions, especially in a pressured situation, a million things crowd into our heads. We humans are hardwired to latch onto something – anything – that’s said which we can directly relate to our own experience.
I listen back to transcriptions of interviews I’ve done and wince. While the important person (that’s not me) is talking I can hear the brain of other person (which is me) working, desperate to find an interval where he can insert his special piece of knowledge. It’s painful. Just let them talk, I shout at the voice recorder app.
King’s other invaluable piece of advice is this: don’t come armed with a list of prepared questions which you then methodically work through. He trained himself to listen to the answer before choosing what to ask next. That requires adaptability, timing and improvisation.
That’s tougher than ever in these dark days when PRs and other minders insist you submit your list of questions beforehand and watch keenly in case you deviate from it. The conversation you’d hope to have becomes a ritualistic exchange of statements instead.
Even if you are not a journalist doing an interview, the art of asking short questions and listening carefully to the answers before you put the next one is one everyone in business can usefully learn.
I’ve seen it go wrong so many times, especially in job interviews and client briefings. Of course we are enthusiastic about the thing we’re talking about (our organisation, our project). That leads to talking and talking gets in the way of listening. As Larry King once put it,
I remind myself every morning: Nothing I say this day will teach me anything. So if I'm going to learn, I must do it by listening. I never learned anything while I was talking.
Here’s our advice. The next time you are doing a Q&A with a client or interviewing a candidate, record it, and make a transcript. Read it back. If your questions run over more than two lines, you're doing it wrong. If your word count is greater than the person you’re interviewing, then you’re doing it seriously wrong.
Our Clarity course offers advice on the art of interviewing.
Collective action
An airbrush (or flaunting?) of influencers at work in Dubai (Credit: Daily Mail)
As The Daily Mail reports on Dubai’s ‘airbrush of celebrity influencers’, here’s some more collective nouns to sum up lockdown 3.0:
A drift of groundhog days
A glaring of home-school pupils
A murder of home-schooling parents
A squelch of walkers
A boast of vaccines
A headache of Team attendees
An ambush of Zooms.
Yet the collective noun – otherwise known as the Sporting Plural – has a longer history than you might think. In 1486, The Book of Saint Albans was printed, aimed at the lucrative Medieval Gentleman market. The author loved to coin a new collective noun: a bevy of ladies, a rascal of boys and a skulk of thieves among them.
The punctuation mark that cost Wagatha Christie dear
Kerry Smith writes: On The Evening Standard, we had a sub-editor who insisted an ellipsis was never more than three dots (colloquially ‘dot-dot-dot’). This would have been excellent advice for Coleen Rooney.
Rooney accused fellow WAG, Rebekah Vardy of leaking false stories. She revealed her alleged betrayer in an infamous social post, the final line of which read: ‘It's ................ Rebekah Vardy’s account’.
Ms Rooney found herself arguing with a court judge on the meaning of an ellipsis. From the Greek word élleipsis meaning 'to leave out', the ellipsis is usually used to indicate words missing from a quoted passage or to trail off intriguingly.
In this case, Rooney argues that her use of 16 dots dilutes her allegation. The judge? He was having none of it and replied, ‘The element of suspense introduced by the multiple dots seems to me designed to raise expectations of a dramatic revelation’ – and promptly ordered Rooney to pay the costs of £23,000. Or £1,437.50 per dot.
Word of the moment
Unsurprisingly, pandemic. Previously hardly uttered, its usage has shot up by more than 57,000% according to Oxford English Dictionary lexicographers. The Greek suffix pan- means all, everything and (in this case) everywhere. Panic is not related, you’ll be glad to hear. That’s the terror seen when the Greek god with the hairy legs and the pipes is in your midst.
Songs for writers
Miles Davis
One of the great leaver-outs of all time [see main piece, above] was the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. He came of age in the era of bebop, where musicians sparred on stage and in the studio to play faster, brasher and more pyrotechnically than their band members. Miles put out the fire with The Birth of the Cool.
The playing in this version of a Rodgers and Hart number is sparse to the point of reluctance. The notes are choked out, capturing the gentle melancholy of a lover who learned the hard way not to take the pleasures of everyday couple-hood for granted. Think how you’d write as this sounds. Think how calm those sentences would be. Reflect that you say a lot by leaving things unsaid.
The full Music for Writers playlist is here.
Writing about writing
How much better is it to be bald than to wear a curly wig
W Somerset Maugham (one of the great masters of the simple sentence)