As always, I will provide an overview of my steps, then go into detail on each.
- Review the prompt
- Review, order and plan follow-ups to my interview questions
- Identify aspects of my character's voice
- Interview & transcription
Step ONE: Review the Prompt
The prompt says that I must conduct an interview with my character, but I note that it does not say what it has to be about. This gives me a great deal of latitude in how to conduct my interview. The prompt also says that the questions must be answered and written according to the character's experience and voice. The Goal of the assignment even points to an understanding of voice as the purpose of the assignment, with the goal of an "authentic" voice being my target. This means I'm going to have to write my character's responses in the same way they speak in the text.
STEP TWO: Review, order and plan follow-ups to my interview questions
Interview Questions
- When did you first meet your husband? How did you initially feel about him?
- You and your husband seem to be very loving, but your relationship does not always seem easy. Why is this?
- Should your husband have defended you when the village took your candle?
- Your home was the only one to have a door in your village. Would you be surprised to hear that my society in one that commonly has doors at the entrances to private spaces? Would you like to visit my society?
- Do you regret leaving your village? Would you do it again? Why?
After reviewing the poem, I need to work on my interview questions. I have included 5 questions for the purposes of this post, but you will likely need more (unless your character gives you long responses). The original versions of my questions are the not-bolded text (the bolded parts showed up in the next step).
It is important that I ask questions in an order that makes sense. Deciding on what to ask and how to order them depends on the goal. In this case, I imagine I am interviewing this character to learn about their values and the relationships they have to the people around them. I put my questions in an order that allows me to first talk about the person closest to her (her husband) and then to begin to talk about larger groups (the village) and ideas (privacy, personal philosophy).
Conducting a quality interview is all about asking quality questions. This means resolving the problem of closed questions. A closed question is a question that can be answered in only a few words or a brief sentence. The goal should be to craft open questions, questions that lead the interviewee to talking at length, maybe even telling brief stories.
To create open questions, I look at the questions that I already have. The first question I have ("When did you first meet your husband?") is a closed question. The response could simply be "When I was a child" or "at 18" or something else similarly short. To improve the question, I build onto it to elicit a longer, more thoughtful response. I do this with each question, ensuring that at no time can my interviewee respond with a few short words.
Sometimes, however, the response will still be too short. In these cases, the interviewer must add follow-up questions. These may not be planned before hand, but help to expand the responses that are received and to fill in gaps that a reader would need to understand what is being said. The easiest follow-up question is "why?", but it can also be useful to ask clarifying questions: "why do you describe it like that?" or "do you mean that you always felt this way?".
In my above questions, I can see that a responses to questions one, three, and four could easily be too short. For these, I should be prepared to ask additional questions.
STEP THREE: Identify aspects of my character's voice
For the purpose of this post, I'll use Beatrice, an old woman and one of the protagonists of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant. Because she is not the narrator (whose identity is a secret until the novel's end), I can only rely on the things she says to determine her voice. I would encourage you to try to limit yourself to your character's speech, however. If they speak a particular way when communicating in the source text, you should expect them to speak the same way during your interview.
Identifying the voice is all about looking at how the character communicates and analyzing what it reveals. For this, I'm going to choose a few examples of speech from the text that illustrate her voice. I'm also going to comment on each example, so as to illustrate the important details I note in each.
"Neither have I any memory of such a woman. Perhaps you dreamt her up for your own needs, Axl, even though you've a wife here beside you and with a back straighter than yours." p 6-7
The "Neither have I any memory" construction is interested and feels out of date, in part because the verb have comes before the subject I. I read a formality in referring to her husband Axl by his first name. Her tone, however, is playful and even a little mocking as she criticizes her husband for talking about another woman. I see she also uses contractions with you've. Additionally, much of her speech here and elsewhere concerns a difficulty with memory, and this image of lost memories in a fog is common.
"It's an insult, forbidding us a candle through nights like these and our hands as steady as any of them. While there's others with candles in their chamber, senseless each night from cider, or else with children running wild. Yet it's our candle they've taken, and now I can hardly see your outline, Axl, though you're right beside me." p 9
I continue to see the elements above, but now I can clearly see there is a tendency toward long sentences, especially when Beatrice feels passionate. She speaks of injustice here, and she has a clear since of indignation regarding how poorly she has been treated.
I'm not going to continue further with this examination of voice, as it is meant only to be a reference and also a reflection of what we have already done in class. The important thing is that I know how to replicate the way this character speaks in the interview itself.
STEP FOUR: Interview and transcription
What follows will be the interview transcript. This is should look similar to what you turn in. Pay attention to the ways in which I ask followup questions of my interviewee, how I modify my questions so that they feel like part of a conversation - how I would actually ask them - and how I try to write down their response as I believe they would have said it. You might also note that I've put this conversation in the physical space of a coffee shop, and so I have modified my questions to reflect this.
Wesley Lydon
9/04/17
English, 9Z
Marigold's Interview
This is my interview with Beatrice, from Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant
Me: Thank you for meeting with me today. I hope you don't mind meeting at a coffee shop.
Beatrice: You are welcome, sir. This is a place I am not accustomed to, but am pleased enough to meet.
M: I was curious, when did you first meet your husband?
B: Certainly it was or must have been a long time past, but I can hardly see this memory. It feels also as though I've just met him and am always just meeting him.
M: Do you know how you felt about him when you met him?
B: I must've felt like a young girl meeting a man in armors upon a horse, even though I don't know why I should see him like that. He is as we are both are, and quite old.
M: You both seem very loving toward each other.
B: That is kind of you to say, sir.
M: You're welcome, but at the same time your relationship does not always seem easy. Why is this?
B: There is a thing in the fog of my memory that I've seen in sideways glances, as though a truth that Axl did not tell me as truth, sir, but I can't say what it may be, this untruth.
M: Is it about the candle? Should Axl have defended you when the village took it?
B: It was a disgrace that they should've taken it, I have heard others saying so much to each other. Perhaps Axl should have defended our candle, although maybe he did. It's an insult, forbidding us a candle through nights like these. There's others with candles in their chamber, even with children running wild. Yet it's ours they've taken. Perhaps he didn't defend it, but he worries so about me being safe. He must have defended me.
M: I noticed your home was the only one to have a door in your village. Are you surprised to see that my society has so many doors? Do you like having them?
B: There are a great many doors. I had noticed, although it may be that there are too many. Certainly a person should have their own door, as I'd assume you do at home?
M: Yes, I do. Many doors, actually. One at the front of my house and more separating the different rooms.
B: That should be altogether too many doors, I think. But I do enjoy that there are doors. Why should there not be a space that is just for oneself?
M: You ended up leaving your village to go on a long journey. Do you regret having to leave?
B: I suppose I must have left my village, where Axl and I called home, to have come here, and yet I haven't more than the emotion of the leaving in me. I don't see it in my mind. Still, I do miss our own small place, with Axl. But we needed to find our son, who had for many months been gone and very likely missing us. To have found him I would have left all over again.
So that's it, that is how I would go about doing this assignment. I hope this post is helpful. If you have any further questions, please leave a comment below so that I can address it.