How many questions should the interviewer prepare? That can vary dramatically - from a lone question to flesh out a minor statistic in a business story (usually done by phone) to an array of hundreds of questions scattered over days or weeks for a Playboy interview. Generally, the more questions the writer prepares, the more thorough his interview and story will be. Some believe the professional interviewer should memorize his questions, like a CIA agent who memorizes his instructions, then puts them to the torch. But it seems more sensible to keep handy a list of essential questions, lest one forget. It's incurably human, and embarrassing, to come away from an interview with an opera singer with some terrific, unexpected material about her childhood - but nothing about her current production.Don't strip mine in an interview - dig deep. The temptation to cover everything yields only a blurry interview studded with intriguing, but isolated, tidbits. Devise your angle, and build your interview around it.Check with your editor; he may have an angle in mind. Omer Henry tells of one editor who had heard of a firm that was using a new wage-incentive plan for its mechanics. "He wanted to know how the plan worked. Knowing exactly what this editor wanted, I was able to draft a set of questions, the answers to which gave me the facts I needed to write and sell the article."Meticulously arranging your questions can be deranging. "The list of questions and the logical sequence invariably disappear very quickly," notes Edward Linn. "If they don't, you're in trouble." Even so, a good interview is sensibly structured. It begins with easy, rather mechanical questions; shifts to knottier, more thoughtful questions; moves back out with mechanical questions (favorite writers, future projects) and closes with a query that offers a ring of finality (one effective question: how would you like to be remembered?). If the interview has logical structure - a sense, of beginning, middle and end - it will have emotional structure as well. The interview as a whole will have an impact that exceeds the sum of its parts.The interview outline need not be dictatorial, or detailed, or even committed to paper. It can be a single, tacit purpose. In fact, the simpler it is, the better. It is only a device to give the interviewer confidence, and his questions, momentum. It gives the interviewer the reins of the interview.     [top]