There's been a few writer interviews I've come across lately that stood out as interesting and reinforced an idea from a post I did last May, "Writers on Writing (it's Work) - Chris Jones on Robert Caro / Gary Cartwright / Mark Kram Jr." This central idea of work and it's import stood out to me in recent interviews with Will Leitch, Gary Smith and Tom Verducci.
The website TVFury provided the first new interview to note here with "The Fury Files: Will Leitch" and the part of greatest impact to me was at the end with Leitch on the effort he feels compelled to put in...
"I feel like I always just have to be a couple of steps ahead of the coroner. I figure if I type really fast, if I always turn in everything in time, if I keep doing things that I enjoy doing (and therefore make sure this never gets stale for me or the reader) … maybe I've got a chance. But I spent a long, long time writing thousands of words that nobody paid me for, that nobody read."
The Gary Smith interview was actually from 2008, but perhaps it's fitting to link to something a few years old here as Smith has for such a long period been doing great features for Sports Illustrated. On the Poynter Institute website was a post by current ESPN writer Jamele Hill titled "‘Going Deep’ with Sports Illustrated‘s Gary Smith." Background was Hill had written Smith back around 2000 asking about his approach to journalism and while there was a number of interesting responses passed along here, I particularly liked Smith on the subject of reporting and getting a source to open up...
"A lot of times it’s rephrasing a question three, four or five ways. A lot of us have the pat answer or the safe answer or the quick answer, [which is] is the first answer we’ll give. Sometimes it takes that many times of coming back at it in a slightly different way to unlock a little something more."
Finally, Jeff Pearlman on his website last month did the interview "The Quaz Q&A: Tom Verducci" with the Sports Illustrated writer / MLB Network reporter / FOX game analyst. Just as Leitch and Smith provided, there's a ton of solid content from Verducci, but (similar to from the Smith interview) the part I found most interesting was on reporting...
"Patience is a requirement. Anybody with a credential and a pen or a microphone can get “a” quote. You've seen it, Jeff: the scrum around the star of the game and the stock questions that typically feature phrases such as “how surprised were you . . . ,” “the mindset,” and “what pitch.” The worst are the non-questions. They almost always start like this: “Talk about . . . .” It’s sheer laziness. The point is that you ask a stock question you get a stock quote.
I don’t want mere quotes. I want information. And I want what’s true. You have to be patient if you’d rather drill closer to bedrock than the surface layer."
