The following has been edited for clarity and length. Listen to/watch the full interview on the Interviewist YouTube channel.

Sarah: How are you involved with interviewing these days?

Lauren: It's constant. I typically do a couple interviews a day of varying lengths, ranging from 30 minutes to a couple of hours.

What do you consider your interviewing superpower?

I was actually just talking about this with my therapist. He was like, we actually have very similar occupations, because you're finding a pattern in something that doesn't necessarily appear to have a pattern at first glance. And for him, looking at me, that pattern is chronic anxiety. And for me, looking at someone else, it's figuring out where they are now and how that relates to the other parts of their life.

I know you from Chicago. But now you're in Texas, which feels like a pretty different place. Are there any cultural nuances when talking to Texans?

Texas is very different from the rest of the U.S. I feel very lucky to have come here first as an editor, because it allowed me to get to know the state through what other writers were doing, and to see how they did their jobs and talk to people. 

There are a lot of stereotypes that the rest of the nation has about Texas, so I think there's a little bit of suspicion toward someone in the media who's not from here. What that meant for me was making sure I went into interviews so, so, so, prepared, and not having to ask questions about basic stuff and not pretending like I knew more than I did.

You've interviewed “celebrity celebrities” like Zac Efron, maybe more local celebrities, and then a lot of non-celebrities, too. How do you approach these different types of people in interviews?

If I'm doing a cover story about an actor, I'm going into it with a lot more pre-written questions. Typically, 30 is the number that makes me feel safe. It's totally arbitrary, but that's just where I've arrived. 

One day I'll draft 10 questions, and then the next day I'll do 10, and then the next day I'll do 10. By the time I get to 30, I've typically thought through and done enough research to: A) Figure out what's interesting about this person and what I want to hit, and B) I've organized that into three or four sort of sections, which do ultimately become the sections of a profile. It stays pretty exact, and where we go within those spaces varies. But those 30 questions do become the spine of a story later.

For a regular person or civilian—typically, it's clearer why they're a story. Not to say that celebrities aren't inherently interesting. Obviously, there is something inherently interesting about them, but you have to do a lot more work to figure out the “why now” and what you want to talk about. 

It’s a lot less organic in some ways than talking to Tandy Freeman, the rodeo doctor. I have so many things that I want to know. And in that kind of situation, these sections of the piece emerge from the interview. I go into it knowing less about what it's going to look like later.

What’s your stance on using tools like ChatGPT to help create interview questions?

I wish ChatGPT were more useful for this. Maybe it'd be useful to have ChatGPT comb all of Joe Rogan's interviews for the best questions he's asked. But with a profile of an actor, it's so specific that it just doesn't really help. 

I typically will start, if it's an actor or musician, with really going deep in what they've made, and see what questions intuitively come to me as I'm watching a movie or listening to an album.

Reddit is also so useful because it's the best distillation of what other people are curious about. I can talk to friends about someone, and that is helpful, but I won't get the perspective of a 60-year-old man in the middle of the country who's wondering who this guy is. 

If I'm having trouble getting in the mood of how I'm going interview someone, I listen to SmartLess. Partly because they’re peers interviewing people in their industry, they're so casual and conversational with people. They do more biographical stuff than I typically do, but it’s such a good tool for when I need to get in the mindset of having a conversation that's guided with someone.

Sometimes you hit that blank page, and all of your curiosity just vanishes.

Yeah. I'll read certain writers—their inquisitiveness that comes through in their pieces is really useful to me. Gabriella Paiella is a really good profile writer. In reading her pieces and reading what she gets from people, I'll be able to think, Oh, I wonder what she asked to get that. Anna Peele is another one who's like that, Caity Weaver is like that—just these interesting minds who are doing these interviews. 

Your own stories have a lot of detail and character. How do you balance holding an engaging interview while noting non-verbal cues, your environment, etc? 

 It’s hard to do if you're really engaged in a conversation. But there are a lot of pauses in an interview—maybe someone has to go to the bathroom—and you spend five minutes writing. Or if they're talking about something that, you know, you're not going to use—that’s a couple of minutes. 

I tend to sit down after any interview—even if it's super late or I'm driving back or whatever—I'll pause and write down everything that I remember from the interview, even if I'm not sure if it's going to be useful. Everything from what they were wearing and how they moved to the conversation that they had with the server, what they ordered. I do that pretty hastily.

And then when I get home, I transcribe those notes. The notes as I write them are actually pretty rudimentary, like one word. But in transcribing them, a lot of stuff does come back, and I can get the bones of the story going there, and the moments that are going to be really good.

How do you then go into the writing process using your interview materials? 

When I transcribe the notes, I'm also getting a sense of the scenes that are anchoring the piece. Someone in grad school actually told us to start by moving chronologically, and I do still kind of stick to that. 

So it’s like, here are the scenes. Here's how we're going to move through this experience. And then it’s seeing, okay, these themes have emerged, and there are three of them, and here's how I'm going to tie this into that scene. Here's a natural tie-in with that scene, and here's a great ending.

But I end up a lot of times with the piece basically pre-written in my head, and then I get to the ending, and I'm a lost beluga whale on those seas. 

When you're setting up interviews, how much say or sway do you have in where or how you're interviewing people?

Typically, I'll want to do a multi-hour sit-down interview at some point, and then I also would love to shadow you doing something that you do every day. That's a lot more feasible for a regular person versus a celebrity. 

With celebrities now, often you have three hours to have dinner with this person. And the scenes are going to be dinner. In my opinion, it's better than when I first started writing profiles, when there was this push to have people do an activity. It started to feel really manufactured because a celebrity doesn't actually want a journalist to join them while they're like, watching their kids or whatever, right? And so it would be like, we're gonna go bungee jumping. And that was just an awful era in profile writing, in my opinion. 

But with a regular person, honestly, it's going to be much more interesting scenically, typically. Because after an interview, and after you get to know each other, you can be like, Oh, you mentioned this thing that you do. I would love to come with you and do that. For Texas Monthly this year, I profiled a free diver, and she was so open and fun. She gave me a tour of this community that she lived in, and we sat in a waterfall—that stuff is just so great.

Do you have any questions in your back pocket that usually get a good response out of someone?

 I've been trying out: “What are the chapters of your life?”

There's a lot that I try out, and they don't work.

There's one I’ve tried like 30 times. One time, a man answered really beautifully, and I was like, this is the best question. It’s for actors. It was like: What about your face do you think people respond to? And one guy, I think it was Rami Malek, was like, I have really big eyes. That's a great answer that helps me when I have to physically describe this person—it's going to be really useful to have him be like, I've got big eyes, you know. And it never worked again, but I did try it for years.

What is your most memorable interview?

Probably Joan Cusack. I mostly write for men's magazines when I do profiles, so I don't get to do these deep dives into women a lot. So that was really thrilling for me. She also gave me so much to work with. She has this very vivid life outside of her career, and the story ended up not being about her career at all. It was about this store she has, it was so fun. I loved that. 

And this free diver who I profiled for Texas Monthly last year. Similarly, I just related to her personally, and I knew it was going to be a really fun story to write because I was taking a lot away from it on a personal level.

Any additional interviewing inspirations, muses, role models?

Definitely the SmartLess guys. Joe Rogan is a really good interviewer. He just makes his interviewees into their best talking selves. There are quotes that he has earned that stick with me all the time. His Matthew McConaughey interview is a really wonderful instance of interviewing. So whatever I feel about the man, he’s very good at what he does.

Final advice for other interviewers and writers out there?

The piece of advice that I always give to writers who are starting out with profiles is to be the person who sends the story to the person you interviewed.

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