Dealing With a Lousy Interview

zoom-h2Adam West, dressed as Batman, is running around a dock on my television screen, with a large cartoon stereotype explosive fizzing away in his hands. He wants to toss it before the inevitable explosion, but everywhere he turns there are ducks, nuns, kids on bikes. He looks at the camera and says, “Some days, you just can’t get rid of a bomb.”

The same logic applies to lousy interviews that you absolutely have to use to finish your writing work for the day. You know the ones I mean–self serving, bland, mono-syllabic. Worse than useless, as some might say.

So what do you do?



It’s clear that you can’t get out of using the interview, but chances are you can’t just run the quotes and make the person look like the dullard they really are. Instead, you’ll have to use some judicial editing. Try some of these tricks to make your job easier:

1. Paraphrase the worst bits of the quote and run the most effect parts of the interviewee’s sentences. Don’t run the line “We had, um, you know, about twenty casualties after the explosion. There were burned up cars everywhere and the smell was terrible.” Instead, try running the line “…About twenty casualties after the explosion.” See how much punch that line delivers all by itself?

2. Judicious use of “So-and-So says” can help you link quotes where it’s not misleading to do so. Like so:
“I hate my boss and I’m going to shoot him in the face.” Vice Admiral Teapants also says, “But I’m not going to use a pistol unless it’s only filled with water.”

You can’t change the context of the statements with this bridging technique–so be VERY careful when using it so that you don’t distort the speaker’s intent.

3. Run the front end of a quote but dump the bad parts on the tail. You can paraphrase the rest. Example:

“I would rather eat my own garbage,” Johnny Dimwit says, but adds his neighbors might be a tasty midnight snack.

4. Don’t even run the quote, but simply paraphrase if you can get away with it:

“The director of sales says he’s outsourcing all of his in-house advertising work outside the United States, but he refuses to translate the results into English, stating that it’s better if people don’t really understand his advertising copy.”

These tricks can help you salvage the piece or at least do a bit of damage control.