Tuesday, April 13, 2010 - 7PM
HOW TO INTERVIEW SOURCES FOR NON-FICTION WRITING
(and How to Tell When They are Lying) with Charles R. Cross
How to Write Like I Do Adult Writing Series at 826 Seattle
One of the most important skills for any writer to learn is how to properly interview sources. Often, aspiring writers put excessive amounts of energy into crafting prose, ignoring the quality of the source material used to create their thesis. For a biography, interviews are usually the foundation upon which a book is built, but they are also vital to journalism, memoir, script writing, and historical fiction. For Charles R. Cross’s 2005 book, Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix, he interviewed 325 people—and a dozen of them were liars who could have scuttled the book, and history, without proper interviewing truth-seeking techniques. In this one-night workshop, Cross will address some of the basics of interviewing techniques, but he also will discuss how to determine the validity of subjects—an increasingly important aspect to writing in an era of fabrication and scandal.
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ABOUT CHARLES: Charles R. Cross is the author of seven books, including Led Zeppelin: Shadows Taller Than Our Souls released in October 2009 by It/Harper Collins. Heavier Than Heaven, his biography of Kurt Cobain, won the ASCAP Award for Outstanding Biography in 2002 and is presently being made into a theatrical film. Cross was editor of The Rocket, the Seattle music magazine, from 1986 through 2000. His writing has appeared in numerous magazines including Rolling Stone, Esquire, Playboy, Spin, and Spy. His writing has also appeared in dozens of newspapers including the London Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Seattle Times, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He lectures and teaches at a number of colleges on both journalism and pop culture. He has taught interviewing techniques at a number of writing workshops, and he occasionally is hired by law firms to present this class.
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