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Swapping words across the digital space - the rise of online interviews

JA June 10

On my usual trawl across the blogosphere this week, I came across an article on VQR. The first thing I noticed was that it was about the rise of the written author interview, namely the email interview. The second was a little panicking pop-up box telling me that some sort of viral threat was about to enter my computer and that I should get out quick smart. Well I did, and hence why I’m not linking to the article in case there’s some kind of bug out there waiting for perusing Spike readers (those armed to teeth with anti-viral software can google at will).

Anyway, before I got out of the Matrix, I did manage to catch the gist of it, which was basically this:

In days of old, TV, radio and newspapers were the staple elements of all book-orientated publicity. Evidently, with the rise of blogging, author interviews have taken on a different shape and are now regularly conducted over email. For one, most bloggers do so in their spare time and don’t always have the ability to organise face-to-face meets (which also involve the logistics of recording and transcribing). For another, the casualness of email sits on par with the form. Granted, email interviews are only a portion of all the information out there, but how do they change the dynamics between the interviewer and interviewee, and shape our perception of novelists in turn?

One advantage of the email interview is that, as poet Edward Hirsch observed, it’s a good way of ‘mixing the intimacy of conversation with the precision of writing’. Arguably, this allows novelists to communicate in their preferred form. Writer and long-time New Yorker editor, William Maxwell, conducted many of his interviews via typewriter because, ‘I think better on the typewriter than I do just talking’.

Jeanette Winterson also recently mentioned her discomfort with face-to-face interviews at the Guardian:

I feel like a perfectly good potato put through a masher. Nothing comes out the way I expected, and my skin is off, and the solid, sane things get pulped and the whole thing is served up easy to swallow, but not for me. I am still somewhere at the bottom of the masher shouting “I AM A POTATO GET ME OUT OF HERE”.

On the flipside, VQR also wondered if written responses gave authors too much control over their words, thereby robbing conversations of their quirks and revelations. It’s possible that online interviews miss some of the suddenness of speech, such as jokes and verbal prompts, but that doesn’t always mean that they won’t go in surprising directions. The Guardian recently featured an article in which writers were asked to ask themselves the questions they always wished they were asked (if you follow me). The answers, which I’m guessing were written, were both observant, humorous and quirky at turns.

Of more interest I think is how email interviews, and the degree of control that they offer, play a part in constructing online personas. James Bradley has touched on this before in terms of blogging.

Despite the illusion of openness, all writing is fundamentally an exercise in controlling the terms of the reader’s access to the writer’s inner life. This is probably clearest in forms like the personal essay, but it’s equally true of fictional forms, in which the raw material of feeling and experience is encoded and transfigured by the process of creation: even at their most honest writers are always withholding, shaping, controlling … online writing is still about inventing versions of the self, whether as pleasing personas, disguises or simply creations to be deconstructed and analysed

Jonathan Lethem echoed this in an email exchange with David Gates, organised by PEN America, which incidentally is another example of an interesting online hybrid.

… I recall reading an introduction to a collection of Robert Sheckley’s short stories where he confessed that the only way he could find his way into a voice for writing an introduction to a collection of stories was to pretend he was writing one more story, about a writer who’s writing an introduction. And just as I’ve more or less solved the problem of participating in this little exchange with you by thinking of it as a story about two writers having an exchange. (They’re not bad guys, these two, they just don’t know what they’re talking about.) My first-person voice isn’t non-autobiographical, I’d never deny those overtones, but it isn’t me, you know?

I certainly don’t think this is a bad thing – far from it. Even speaking face-to-face often involves crafting some sort of ‘personality’. Online interviews also have a lot to offer in terms of the freedom given to the interviewee to craft the content – from more thoughtful discussion to light, irreverent details like images, blog links or YouTube clips (Angela’s Meyer’s responsive interviews on Literary Minded are a great example of this). Another good example of just how clever and reactive online interviews can be are these conversations with designer Coralie Bickford-Smith. For the interview, Alan from Penguin would send her an image, Coralie would then respond with whatever she wanted, and so on. I also liked the idea of them both choosing ‘fonts’ to represent themselves on screen.

All in all, Spike certainly thinks that there’s a lot to be seen as this form evolves. In this vein, we’re starting an irregular series of short interviews (conducted online) from next week. We’ll be speaking to authors, illustrators, designers and poets on the creative process, as well as some old chestnuts like daily routines and day jobs. Some of these will be by the book, others we hope to make ‘reactive’. Stay tuned.

 

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