This seminar focused on the mechanics of pre-interview research, building rapport with subjects, managing narrative flow, and editing dialogue into impactful media assets. We approached it from two angles: not just for folks running their own interviews, but what to expect as a guest of other platforms (a key part of advertising your RPG business or freelancing skills!).
The Interviewee’s Mindset
We kicked off the track by setting the foundational mindset of a master interviewer, emphasizing that your primary responsibility is to direct the narrative, represent the audience, and remain in the background while extracting soundbites and authentic stories.Achieving this level of depth requires a thorough understanding of the room before pressing record, specifically balancing a subject’s natural anxieties against what they want to convey. Interviewees frequently arrive guarded, terrified of rambling, appearing unprepared, or being misquoted. Yet, they also want to communicate their personal achievements, meaning they require guidance and psychological safety to share.
It's not easy. Keep a guest comfortable while getting them to tell a story happens organically only if everyone's on the same page from the start.
Building Rapport Before the Mic Turns On
The success of an interview is almost always decided in the critical minutes before the recording begins, making pre-interview rapport building a key step. We walked our attendees through a pre-interview checklist designed to ground the space through an informal, off-the-record chat.Hosts should intentionally find common ground by touching on throwaway shared experiences (examples: local weather, pop culture, travel logistics, or in the case of recording a convention, general convention fatigue). It is equally vital to set boundaries by explaining the full interview arc before starting, ensuring the subject knows what to expect about the duration and questions that will be asked.
It also helps if you show you've done your homework: know your guest's background and assure them they will not be forced to field generic queries or off-topic (AKA "gotcha") material.
Print, Audio, and Video
Because interviewing is never a one-size-fits-all discipline, the specific delivery medium changes your focus and strategy. For print and written articles, workflow should focus on verified quotes and adherence to a theme, making it a best practice to write a narrative outline before the session even begins. If a guest fails to provide the exact data you need, will rephrase the prompt and approach the question from a different angle.Conversely, audio and podcast formats require you to embrace natural pauses and moments of thinking out loud rather than interrupting the flow. In an audio environment, nod along; this is important on video, obviously, but even during a record (assuming the interviewee can see you) help stoo. On-camera and video formats require you to act essentially as your own technical producer, guiding your guest on maintaining proper eye contact, mitigating background distractions, and keeping physical gestures within the camera frame.
The 80/20 Rule
The true skill of a master interviewer relies on active listening, adhering strictly to the 80/20 rule by spending 20 percent of the time talking and 80 percent listening. This works well, incidentally, in general social situations. Shifting your mental focus away from planning your next pre-written question toward analyzing what the subject is saying in the moment allows you to uncover emotional cues and unscripted gold.We broke down four dialogue tactics to maintain this momentum, starting with the echo technique, where a host repeats the last few words of a statement with an upward inflection to invite deeper reflection without breaking the guest's momentum. Similarly, implementing two to three seconds of deliberate silence after an answer forces breakthroughs, as guests will fill the quiet. Hosts must also grant themselves permission to pivot away from scripts when a subject stumbles onto a game-changing anecdote. Talking to people is always a negotiation between what you want to ask and what they want to tell you.
Stories Instead of Scripts
What if you're going to be interviewed? An interview is fundamentally a two-way street, so we flipped the perspective during the panel to teach our attendees exactly how to act as exceptional interviewees. This framework relies on preparing three core pillars for any media appearance, ensuring the guest can deliver an insight, a turning point involving a pivotal crisis or realization, and a takeaway for the audience.Answers should be framed around the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) method, structuring responses while leveraging visual details and specific past mistakes to make the story compelling. Furthermore, it's important to practice bridging and pacing techniques to deliver your thoughts in tight blocks of thirty to forty seconds (media training largely consists of this "block and bridge" methodolgy). If a host delivers a tricky or off-base prompt, a trained subject can deploy these bridging phrases to pivot the conversation back to their core message without sounding defensive or guarded. This method also happens to be very useful for another form of interview, the job interview!
The audience was very engaged and took notes, but you don't have to: you can download the presentation for free at our Patreon. Our next event we attended (and finally, done with hosting) at Gen Con was the Dungeons & Dragons Carnival. We'll cover that in an upcoming article.
