Interview technique

Playing the tape of my interview with Dan Dennett, I hear myself, and think ‘what was I thinking’; then I can hear in the following silence the other party thinking the same thing and desperately trying to discover some peg in what I have said for what it is they want to say. It’s not that I am incapable of coherent thought, but that most of the time I can only collect it on paper. There is no backspace key in real life, but I am always reaching for one — I get half way through a sentence and then realise that it should have started somewhere else if it is to go where I suddenly realise it wants to. Or I say out loud an idea — the equivalent of bashing it down before I forget — but I don’t have a mouse available to push it to its proper position three paragraphs on. No wonder the poor sod at the receiving end is mystified. The only advantage that my speech has over my writing is that it’s free of typos.

Yet all this comes about because I want the other person to talk freely. If I had a grid of questions, or if I were trying to get them to admit something, how much simpler it all would be — and how very much more difficult.