How to Practice Interviewing When You Have No Source Yet
An empty notebook is a weightier burden than a full one when you are learning to report for the first time. Many people think interviewing is something that you do only once you have an actual source willing to talk, but in fact you can start the process much earlier. A good interview is built from attention, preparation, and the ability to listen past a first answer. So even before you line up a formal conversation, you can begin to practice. At the start, the goal is not to sound brilliant. It is to learn how to ask clear questions, stay curious, and recognize when an answer needs follow-up.
A useful exercise is to turn everyday conversation into a listening exercise. Choose a simple subject that already has depth, like a family recipe, a neighborhood repair, a missed train, a childhood object that has been saved for decades. Ask one person to describe it in depth for five minutes. Your task is not to interrupt with your own version of the story or leap ahead to your next prepared question. Follow the answer instead. If someone gives you a detail, ask for the scene surrounding that detail. If someone says, “It was chaos,” don’t move on. Ask what made it chaotic, what they saw first, what happened next. This simple exercise teaches you one of the essential habits of reporting: vague words are often evidence of something more specific hiding underneath.
One of the common pitfalls is writing questions that sound serious but don’t lead anywhere. Beginners often write questions like “How did that make you feel about the situation overall?” because it sounds like a thoughtful question. But in fact, it almost always results in broad, generic answers that aren’t very useful. A better strategy is to ground the question in a moment. Instead, ask, “What did you do right after you heard the news?” or “What was the room like when that happened?” Those questions invite memory, not summary. And if the answer still seems too vague, don’t panic, and don’t rush. Simply repeat back one memorable word and let silence do some work. Often the next sentence is the one that comes to life.
You can develop a daily practice to hone that skill even before you have all the right conditions in place. Spend the first five minutes reading an article in your local paper and underlining three places where you wish there was more detail. Spend the next five minutes turning that curiosity into stronger questions, trying to focus on questions that start with what, how, when, where, show me. Then spend five more minutes reciting those questions out loud, because an awkward question sounds obvious when you hear it. On alternate days, record yourself asking and answering the questions, then listen back to the tape and mark places where you cut off the answer too soon or asked two questions at once. That is practice with some friction, which is exactly what helps the new skill take root.
If you get stuck, it’s often not a matter of confidence, but of focus. New reporters often try to interview someone about “working in a busy market.” That’s too big a subject to tackle. Try narrowing it down until you can see what you’re aiming at. Instead of asking someone to talk about “working in a busy market,” ask them to talk about one morning, one customer, one broken scale, one argument over price. Journalism is almost always stronger when it moves from general labels toward specific moments. If your notes seem flat, try going back to the senses. What could someone see, hear, touch, count in a given moment? Often just that question can save a flat interview.
Feedback is essential here, but it’s most useful when it’s specific. Don’t ask whether your questions were any good. Ask whether they resulted in specific detail, whether they were too long, whether they pushed the answer in a direction too soon. Go through your transcript or notes and circle every place where the answer went vague. Then rewrite just the follow-up question you should have asked in that spot. This is one of the fastest ways to improve because it helps turn a general feeling (“that interview was terrible”) into a specific fix. Over time, you start to notice your own patterns: maybe you explain too much, maybe you soften direct questions, maybe you fail to catch the emotional turn in a story because you’re too busy consulting your notes.
Interviewing isn’t a performance. It’s attention translated into language. The more you practice eliciting a scene, clarifying a timeline, hanging onto a telling detail, the less mysterious the process of reporting will seem. Your first interviews may feel clumsy, but clumsy work, examined closely, can evolve into stronger work very fast.
