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Radio Interviewing Tips: Creating Mystery and Magic out of Everyday Topics
Copyright © 2002 - 2010 by Susan Harrow. All rights reserved.
I miss mystery and magic. I miss kids making toys out of
dirt and leaves and twigs. I miss being read to at night
before sleep. I miss sitting around a fire hearing long
rambling stories with surprise endings. I want more time and
less pressure. I want to understand more and talk less.
A radio interview gives you all the space in your
imagination for musing about the past--but not all the time.
On the radio you can spin a yarn, but you sure won't get
enough time to knit an entire sweater or even finish the
thumb on a mitten. But you can maximize your time by telling
stories that intrigue and leave enough out so your audience
wants more.
1. Say what you're not going to tell.
I was listening to NPR commentator, teacher and writer
Reynolds Price talk about his transition from walking person
to paraplegic on Terry Gross' NPR show "Fresh Air." When she
asked him what he had to give up he answered her first by
telling her what he wasn't going to tell her. I was all
ears.
He said he was going to say one thing, but after he said his
one thing he wasn't going to say any more about it. In other
words he was defining his limits in no uncertain terms. And
he did it in such a way as to make it final. His one thing:
When he became paraplegic he gave up sex--because he had
to--physically. End of story. This was the only point in the
interview when he became quietly serious. You knew that this
one thing was a hardship for him. He spoke of many joys, but
the lack of the physical affection that he knew in his old
life pained him. It was obvious in the not-telling.
2. Don't take serious matters too seriously.
Reynolds Price discussed the two visions he had during his
lifetime and their impact on the way he lives his life now
at age 72. Visions are a touchy subject for anyone. But
Price made the profound both mysterious and funny. His
second vision was about twenty years ago, right before he
had the radiation treatments that paralyzed his legs. He and
Jesus were in a body of water and Jesus was pouring water on
the scar on his spine. He told him his sins were forgiven.
Price asked him, "But am I healed?" Jesus said, "That too."
In spite of this vision and Jesus' proclamation Price opted
for radiation treatment anyway--which made his legs useless.
Why? "I don't know." Later he said that his affliction made
him feel chosen. Aren't people unfathomable? Doesn't it make
you wonder?
3. Surprise yourself by doing.
It's one thing to think of sound bites to say, another to
practice them out loud by yourself, still another to
practice with a sound bite buddy, and different still to
actually do a radio interview.
Kathan Brown, author of "Ink, Paper, Metal, Wood," says of
the artist Wayne Thiebaud, "I learned from Thiebaud that
artists are in lifelong pursuit of 'it", one baby step at a
time. Lightning bolts seldom come down from the sky, he
said, but one thing does lead to another, so ideas recur,
and changing anything changes everything. In a 1987 lecture
Thiebaud told his audience that printmaking has made 'an
important difference' in his 'inquiry into how form
evolves." Making a print, he said, is 'an orchestration
between what you think you know and what you're surprised to
learn."
4. Speak of now.
O.K. I train people to hone their sound
bites, their stories,
their anecdotes down from a beanfield to a bean. But I love
the sun that warmed the beanfield, the beanfield itself and
the road that lead to it. But once you've honed the
beanfield into beans and spoken about the beans in every
context possible you're now free to speak of all the things
that surround the beans.
Once you become fluid in your sound
bites you no longer need
to adhere to them. You can take an event from your life that
happened today and transform it into a sound bite bean that
has a new context. That is the beauty of learning all the
different formats for sound bites until they resonate in your
bones.
In the movie Akeelah and the Bee, Akeelah, the girl studying
to win the national spelling bee title learns all the
derivations of the words she needs to spell. During the Bee
when she hears an unfamiliar word she asks, "What is the
derivation?" She has the clues to spell it correctly once
she knows if it's Latin, Greek, German, Italian etc. because
she knows how words from all of these places are
constructed. Then if she is still unsure she may ask for a
definition of it's meaning, too. So she has all the
information she needs to give an intelligent (and hopefully
correct) spelling.
Understanding word derivation stops the bee from being an
auditory guessing game. Same with sound bites. Once you
understand their construction you can create them on the
spot. Like studying for a spelling bee this comes from days,
weeks, months, years of diligent practice--typically with a
partner.
To turn your beanfields into beans
go here.
You'll get a
bean picker to help shell your beans too--your choice of a
sound bite buddy in the community of like-minded people I've
created for you.
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Susan Harrow, CEO of
http://prsecrets.com, is
a top media coach, marketing strategist and author of
Sell Yourself Without Selling Your Soul® (HarperCollins),
The
Ultimate Guide to Getting Booked on Oprah, and
Get a 6-
Figure Book Advance. Clients include Fortune 500 CEOs, bestselling authors and entrepreneurs who have appeared on
Oprah, 60 Minutes, NPR, and in TIME, USA Today, Parade,
People, O, NY Times, WSJ, and Inc. |
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