No Life is Simple

(This essay is from 12 years ago.)

If they were all added up. I wonder how many people I've interviewed in my career. How many people's stories I've collected and how many quotes I've selected.

You'd think it would all boil down to a formula, but it doesn't. Everyone is different; everyone's story is unique.

These days (circa 2012) I do a few interviews in person each week, a few others by phone, and a few others by email. I interview self-published authors for an ebook distributor, starting with a phone interview, followed by a Q&A in email.

That way there's no need to take notes or use a recorder, nor are there any worries about misquoting someone.

Still, even when the structure of an interview falls into a familiar pattern, because you are having a similar conversation to others about similar topics or ideas, the unique ways people see the world and tell their stories reshapes even familiar territory into new terrain.

That's one reason I like being a journalist. Being exposed to multiple perspectives on all kinds of things helps keep me from falling into a rut of unexamined thinking, or descending into the echo chamber of group-think.

At least I hope it does.

It might seem to some that the interviews I used to do of famous and prominent people for bigger publications like Rolling Stone or Salon about weighty topics were more important than my current short blog profiles of startups or ebook authors.

But I don't see it that way. A person's story is their story, whether they are powerful or unknown, whether the narrative seems complex or relatively simple.

And there's nothing simple about any life.