Interviewing to Create Portraits.
This exercise is a good introduction to interviewing, for helping students to get aquatinted and to help them to learn to focus their writing.

? Generate five open-ended questions which are so broad and open you could ask them of anyone.
? Pair off randomly (I often pass out index cards and people find the person who has the same number on the card that they do.)
? Ask each other the questions on your sheet.  Note down your answers.  Try to get good quotes to use.
? Pause. Generate five specific follow-up questions from the answers you have received to your initial questions.  Decide on an area on which to focus your questioning.
? Interview each other again.  Get quotes.
? Ask any follow-up questions which occur to you.
? Write a portrait of the person you interviewed, including information relative to your focus and excluding anything not relevant to your focus.
? VARIATION: Instead of writing a portrait, ask students to write a story using the person they interviewed as a main character.  They must use anything they do know about the person, but they are free to make up what they don’t know.  So if they know the person is from New Hampshire, they can’t have him born in China, but they can make up anything they do not know and are not obligated to mention everything they do know.

Examples (of portraits)

PJ likes to do simple things in life.  He enjoys taking life one day at a time and never passing up an opportunity to have fun. It seems like he’ll go through life enjoying it, instead of fearing what may be ahead. This is good because he’s way too young to get stressed out.  He’s the type of guy that a lot of people wish they could be like.

Ryan seems to value power and money.  He would like to own his own town someday if he can so that he could take care of his citizens and they would look up to him.  Obviously, owning a town takes money and when I asked him what his driving passion – the thing that makes life worth living—is, he replied, “money, because money is the most important thing in society and everything revolves around money, except for love.”  Maybe he has a sensitive side too….