Right now I make my main living at a newspaper and a portion of my work involves articles on artists and their work — by artists I mean the traditional sort, as well as filmmakers and musicians and writers and photographers. Over the time I’ve been doing it, I’ve come to realize that a good piece on a creative person — and certainly anyone else you care to do an article on — walks a very strange line between fictional writing technique and journalism.

The balance is like this — you are there to tell this person’s story. You are also there to provide some context for this person’s story and to sometimes pull meaning from the undercurrents of what they tell you. There’s a side to it that isn’t far from being a shrink — you’re looking for patterns in order to find your article’s theme, and much like a shrink, the best way to arrive at these patterns is through a freeform give-and-take. At its best, an interview is an aural collaboration between the two parties, and what transpires in print is a result of the work together.

I feel like the most successful articles I have written have always been followed up by notes from the person the article was about explaining in one way or another that what I wrote helped them frame their own work to them. I’ve had at least one artist tell me that she keeps the article I wrote about her tacked up near her workspace for moments when she has lost track and come unfocused from what she is doing with her art.

That, to me, is the most successful article you can write — and, I think, it’s something that should be adapted into critical work as well, but that’s for another time.

The real point of all this is to address how in the world you do that. Over time, I’ve seen a lot of younger people pass through the newsroom, and a majority of them studied to be a writer in general, and a journalist more specifically, in college. What this experience seems to have taught them is to be tidy in their information gathering, which demands a list of questions that give structure to the conversation and, later on, the story itself.

I say hogwash to all that. A good article is as much an artistic endeavor as a good story, and the same anguish and gut feelings need to be poured into it. I rarely come up with a list of questions for my interviews — instead, I approach it as if I were having a conversation over a beer with this person at its most amiable, and if it were a therapy session at its most professional. The important thing about this approach is that I let the subject guide the conversation, but I pay enough attention to what they say in order to get them to expand on the odd and interesting things people say when they are not being quizzed, when they are comfortable in an exchange.

When the process is done, I transcribe out the conversation and scour it for its own structure.

Why do I do it this way? Because I’m interviewing people the way I would have preferred to be interviewed — and was by the better reporters. Over the years, I’ve been interviewed by press for my comic book work, zine work, and my two published books, and as that was happening, I took every thing to heart, so that once I was in the position of sitting on the other side of the phone — the side with the recorder on — I had a pretty good idea of how to write a by-the-numbers article about a person and promptly decided to ignore that knowledge.

That is really where the fictional writing technique comes in — every person is a story that needs to unfold. They unfold through interviews that, like poetry, require interpretation. When you compile an article, you are crafting your subject’s official story — to do this, you need to get inside them, to write as if  you are inhabiting a character in fiction.

Conversely, I think learning how to write non-fiction in this manner will only help you with your fiction. You never know what kind of person you will profile, and the challenge of that is invaluable if you are able to rise to the occasion. As you begin to live inside the three dimensions of other people, and hand yourself over to their reality, you’ll be able to apply that to your own characters, and they’ll come as alive for you as the people who taught you that sort of empathy.