•There are four basic steps to writing an interview:

•Making arrangements – except for spontaneous interviews (in case of breaking news), one must try and arrange for an interview in advance. Call the person, identify yourself and make an appointment. Describe your story if need be and then do your homework about the person and what he/she does. This will help you to ask informed questions.

•Research, research, research – The more you research, the better your questions will be. Prepare your questions in advance as well.

•The interview itself – its not advisable to start off with your questions right away. You have to break the ice. Start off with some informal/casual conversation to put the person at ease. Once you start off with the questions, ensure that they are short. Be a good listener. Don’t start criticising outright – this will put the person on the defensive and you may not get the answers you want.

•Reconstructing the interview – common sense dictates that you should have some kind of a voice recorder with you so that you can record the interview (writing it down means missing out on important information as you obviously can’t write as fast as one can speak). However, you should take notes regarding the person’s body language, mannerisms, tone of speaking etc so that you can add value.

•Writing an interview can be a challenge because you want to sustain your reader’s interest. You can write your interview in a question-answer format or in paragraphs depending on what kind of interview it is.

•Give a little background about the person, what he/she has accomplished (providing justification for him/her being covered in the paper).

•There is no hard-and-fast rule about the introduction. Since this is a feature (and not a news feature), you can be as creative as you like with the introduction.

•The interview length can vary since, once again, this is not a news story and can be longer than 600 words. However, you don’t want to bore your reader either and you don’t want to drag your story on and on. Try and wrap it up in 1,200 words but if your interviewee had a lot to say, then you can obviously extend the word limit.

•No interview is complete without a picture so make sure you have a picture.

•As with the intros, the headlines can also be creative and out-of-the-box. They don’t have to state the obvious

•Sometimes an interview can occur in context of a recent achievement. Consider the various organisations being interviewed for their flood relief efforts.

•Obituaries can be difficult to write since accuracy is very important. Given that the person is already dead, you can’t actually interview the person in question. The best source of reference are people who knew the person you’re writing about and whatever else has been written about the person.

•Make it lively – writing about a dead person and making his/her life interesting without sounding  callous can be difficult. You must learn to draw the line between the two.

•Show, rather than tell – saying that the person was charitable doesn’t work; use examples to illustrate.