By Ken O’Quinn
Special to Poynter Online
Malcolm Gladwell presented journalists at the Nieman Conference with a provocative idea: if you want to do an “up-close” feature story about Judy Doe, the best person to interview is not Judy.
Hmmm, I thought. How can you write a profile without spending hours, perhaps days, following and talking to the person? We shouldn’t consider them personality profiles, according to Gladwell, because we are not providing the intimate glimpse into someone’s personality that we think we are.
“You can’t get deeply to the core of one individual in a few hours” of interviewing, he said. “People are more complicated than that.”
Besides being shallow, profiles also contain too many titillating but irrelevant details — at the expense of stronger information — and they make flawed connections between a person’s childhood and her accomplishments later in life, Gladwell said.
It was an eye-opener for me and I’m sure for many in the audience, and not everyone took kindly to Gladwell’s position. One woman stepped to the microphone in the aisle and said she found his argument against profiles to be “stunning,” to which he deadpanned, “I’m always happy to stun.”
The New Yorker writer and best-selling author of “The Tipping Point” is known to be provocative.
Perhaps we do mislead readers — and ourselves — by thinking that by following a person around for a day, sometimes weeks, we can provide an in-depth portrayal of who the person is and what he is about. Gladwell said he has never provided an in-depth understanding of anyone in a profile, and as a result has grown “deeply skeptical about the legitimacy” of profiles.
What approach did he suggest? Tell the reader, in essence, “I’m going to tell you about Judy Doe but in the context of a bigger story.” Profiles should be stories that are not so much about the individual as about the world that he or she inhabits, the “subculture,” as Gladwell referred to it.
Take, for example, a profile of a highly successful entrepreneur in cookware. What makes the story interesting, according to Gladwell, is not so much the individual but the international cookware business, the person’s success in that field, the people she associates with, the places she visits, the way in which she fits into the larger picture.
Talk to other people who know her and work with her. Write about her accomplishments and the world she inhabits. If she is like most people, there isn’t much about her that’s truly unusual, and she is not the best person to reflect accurately and candidly on her personality anyway.
“If you want to get to the essence of someone, the best sources are other people in their life,” he said.
We also weaken profile stories by including irrelevant details. To provide a complete, balanced picture, writers often include contrary opinions or unflattering details from the subject’s personal life. But such information dilutes the focus of the story and forces the writer to choose between those details and others because story length is limited.
“You have to realize what you’re losing by going off on these tangential points in the interests of being fair,” Gladwell said.
Gladwell took particular aim at our tendency to look to a person’s childhood for details that yield some fascinating insight into her adult life. That trivializes people who have done extraordinary things because things that happened when people were not mature and were not in charge of their destiny had little bearing on what they accomplished later in life.
We also make unsubstantiated connections between childhood experiences and adult life, Gladwell said. Writers cite a traumatic experience or some significant other event in the person’s youth and then says something like, “John still shows the effects of that experience.” But Gladwell insisted that we have no psychological basis for making such a statement. It’s just that every writer likes to be “a kind of mini-shrink.”
We use the profile format to show what makes a person tick, but the truth is, he or she usually is not inherently unusual. All the personal details we need to include about the subject can be conveyed in a few paragraphs, Gladwell said.
He cited his displeasure with a recent magazine feature story about a college football quarterback. The writer tried so hard to make the player interesting, to reveal some fascinating insight into what makes him tick, but at its core, the story is about a 19-year-old, and there is not much exciting about most 19-year-olds.
Mixed with dry humor, his presentation was informative and entertaining, and it will prompt me to reassess how I approach profiles in the future.
Ken O’Quinn is a writing coach and the principal of Writing With Clarity. He can be reached at koquinn@maine.rr.com.
