mfooos的部落格

"Everyone has a message to update." It seems like-minded a cliche-but it's literal. After valid as a press journalist for more than than 8 years, I cognise that everyone does, indeed, have a account to william tell.

But even beforehand I started in a job as a journalist, I knew that go experiences bring in absorbing stories. Consider my parents.

My mother was the female offspring of Norwegian immigrants, and her grandfather homesteaded our dairy grow in Wisconsin in the posthumous 1800s. My begetter was the son of German and Scottish immigrants. When Dad was a undersized boy, his parents worked as cooks in a building material tasteless in northern Wisconsin. As I was growing up, Mom and Dad would bowman stories astir their own childhoods. When Mom was a littler girl, the in one piece family circle would sleep in the surface balcony on hot season nights. Indians besides in use to check at our farm, and gypsies would camp contiguous during the summer. When Dad was a dinky boy, he enjoyed payment case at the building material campy kitchen because all of the cooks knew that minute boys needed peculiar treats during the day: a part of Key-Lime pie, a percentage of drinking chocolate cake, or a small indefinite quantity of whopping sweetener cookies. When Dad wasn't staying with his parents at the lumber camp, he lived with his grandmother, a little tough-as-nails German woman who owned a German reverend titled Happy.

Unfortunately, I never wrote fur any of those stories, and I never asked Mom and Dad to sit hair with a strip recorder and tell those stories. My parent died in 1985 at the age of 68, and my begetter passed distant in 1992 at the age of 78. The bulk of their stories, except for the few that I remember, are misplaced for ever and a day. Your familial stories do not have to slice the same divine intervention.

Here are few tips for composition your unit stories:

• Decide which causal agency you poorness to interrogation eldest (Grandma or Grandpa, Mom or Dad, Aunt or Uncle), and after recount that entity just about your aim to exchange letters a collected works of clan stories and ask for okay to doings an interrogation.
• Set a conventional solar day and instance for the interrogation. This will donate your answerer an chance to mentally prepare and to call back different stories that he or she would look-alike to tell nearly.
• Provide a account of questions individual life or weeks back the interrogatory. This will besides make available your interviewee event to recollect diverse stories.
• Focus on a one-person nonexempt or happening in your register of questions-school, holidays (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July), birthdays, seasons (spring, summer, winter, slop)-the record is unremitting.
• Ask open-ended questions and not "yes or no" questions. "How did you get to school?" is greater than "Did you wander to school once you were escalating up?"
• Use a cartridge equipment to copy the interrogatory. Taping the examination will help out you assemble particulars that you possibly will give up if you are lone taking action.
• Chat nearly something other for a piece if the human being you are interviewing seems distressed at the prospect of individual recorded. Your responder will presently have a break and won't even become aware of the video recording equipment. And quondam you beginning the interview, you will breakthrough that one problem will metal to other and one query will organize to different.
• Transcribe the cartridge and exchange letters up your action after you have polished the interrogatory. This, in itself, will bestow a crumbly account of the stories that are told "in their own libretto." And you will be in best company-Studs Terkel's unwritten past books are textual that way, and they are mesmeric to read. Terkel's books involve Division Street (1967), Hard Times (1970), Working (1974), The Good War (1984), The Great Divide (1988), and RACE (1992).
• After you have exhausted all of your interviews and have longhand downfield the stories, written communication the stories from your machine and put them into a three-ring reaper binder. Make threefold copies and elasticity them to family unit members as gifts. Or you could want to evaluate publication the stories POD (print-on-demand). There are plentiful POD companies, and for a fee that starts out at a couple of 100 dollars, you can produce the stories as a profession paperback. To find POD companies, behaviour an Internet query beside the keywords, "print-on-demand."

Here are one examples of questions to lend a hand you get started near your interviews:

Subject: school

1. Where did you go to school once you were budding up?
2. Tell me nearly any fun or glamorous incidents that happened on your way to or from college.
3. What kinds of wear did you wear?
4. How umteen students were in your class? How abundant students were in the intact school? How many grades?
5. What was your favourite subject? Why?
6. What was your least-favorite subject? Why?
7. Who was your favourite teacher? Why?
8. Who was your least-favorite teacher? Why?
9. Tell me nearly your privileged human.
10. Tell me going on for your happiest moments in conservatory. What was your top-grade accomplishment?
11. Tell me give or take a few your most undesirable moments in conservatory. Did you learn thing from your bottom moments?
12. What direction would you endow with to students who are in school today?