Profile writing tips from Mark Singer and Susan Orlean

Good friend of mine attended The New Yorker Festival last weekend, and went to the "master class" in profile writing with Mark Singer and Susan Orlean. He took notes and shared them with me. Thought they might be worth sharing with the crowd here.



In chronological order, and without commentary, here's what they said
that he deemed worthy enough to write down:

-The most important thing is to be able to see the profile subject
doing what it is they do. Just observe, don't ask questions.

-Susan Orlean: "I don't ask questions generally. I don't have any good
questions." She said she is more inclined to figure someone out
obliquely and to be around them so much that they forget she's there.
It sometimes gets to the point that she says so little the subject
begins to think Orlean is in over her head. She says they think, "Oh,
that poor girl. She has no idea what she's doing." That's a good
thing.

-Construct your reporting for a profile exactly the way you would go
about making a friend. Get to know them the way you would know a
person in your real life.

-Mark Singer: If you can't tell a story out of your head (because you
have come to know the person so well), then you're not ready to write.

-Find subcultures, and use individuals as ways to write about these
small worlds.

-Singer: "I take an insane amount of notes." He takes his laptop
everywhere (including into uranium mines, etc.) and just acts as a
stenographer for the conversation. It helps that he's a really good
typer.

-Singer: Profiles must have a chronological spine from which things
branch off. You better have a damn good reason to break that
chronology.

-Orlean: "The lede has to be absolutely seductive. It's a strip-tease
and you have to start with your bra."

-Orlean: She said it's surprising that she and Tina Brown are such
good friends because they take exactly opposite approaches to
profiles. Tina Brown's approach is to find someone interesting (like a
celebrity) and tell their story. Susan Orlean prefers to find subjects
that most people would think they would never find interesting, and
then make them interesting.

-Orlean said she keeps a copy of Mark Singer's book "Mr. Personality"
on her desk, and whenever she's stuck she flips through it and reads
passages. She uses it so much that she's on her third copy.

-Singer: "The best way to approach one of those Rolling Stone-style
interviews [in which you are given 45 minutes with a celebrity in a
hotel room] is to shoot yourself in the head."

-Singer said he has stopped writing celebrity profiles, because he
hates them, but he told some funny stories about hanging out with
Donald Trump for a profile. Before giving him something juicy, Trump
would often say, "This is off the record, but you can use it."

And when Singer asked Trump what he considers ideal company, Trump
said, "A total piece of ass." Singer wrote in the piece that Trump is
someone who is "unmolested by the rumblings of a soul." Critics
thought that was harsh and wondered how Singer could know such a
thing. Singer said, "I inferred."

 

Thanks for posting, DD.

there's some great stuff in there. I think the part about observing, rather than asking questions, is a really good point. I know I'm guilty of asking stock questions to get stock quotes sometimes, and I use them as a crutch. A little more observation would do wonders for my writing, I'm sure.

 

A lot of good stuff here, but a lot seems like it should be common knowledge. You want to know the person you are profiling so well that you actually feel that you were a part of their life for a short portion.

I especially liked this little bit:

If it's a strip-tease, don't you start with the shirt first? Maybe I'm picking nits here. The lede must be gravitating and it needs to make the reader feel like they are getting something out of it.

 

The strip-tease comment was great, even though I hear what Mayfly is saying (the bra is usually second item off at best).

In a feature, I've always thought of the lede that way but never put it into those words. Imagine you are walking down the street and you see a goregous woman/man taking off his/her shirt. You'll stick around.

But just make sure that once everything is off, people want to see what you've got.

 

Beautiful stuff, DD

What intrigued me most was the differing approaches to story selection of Orleans and Brown. It could be the chicken or egg debate, but both make interesting points. Well, no, Orleans makes two interesting counterpoints.

I tend to go from person to situation, rather than situation to person. But a good exercise might be flipping it...

hmm

Thanks again

 

Marc Singer?

 

Not exactly breaking news. In the 1980s, Spy magazine called Trump a "short-fingered vulgarian," a description yet to be topped.

 

Alas, what goes around, comes around, when Graydon Carter eventually ended up dining with Trump because he had to. Putz.

 

While rooting around for the Mark Singer piece on the marathon fraud, I came across this short, six-year-old thread with some tremendous advice in it.

I love this quote by Singer, in particular, and obviously it comes through in his choice of a subject for the marathoner piece:

"The best way to approach one of those Rolling Stone-style interviews [in which you are given 45 minutes with a celebrity in a hotel room] is to shoot yourself in the head."