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I offer to bust readers’ excuses for not pitching magazines — or, if they’re pitching, for approaching only low/no-pay pubs. (By the way, if you have an excuse you’d like me to bust, you can send it to [email protected].)

Jessica wrote to me about her excuse: Contacting interviewees before I’ve gotten the assignment to get quotes for the query letter fills me with dread, and I have a hard time overcoming this. I’m also a bit overwhelmed by exactly how and where to find my expert sources – I’ll find someone and think “Yeah, they seem to fit the bill.” But then I start looking and thinking “There are TONS of people who fit the bill. How am I supposed to be discerning about this when I’m so not the expert?”

This is a common fear, but it may make you feel better to know that my e-course students each have to contact three to four experts for pre-query interviews, and I can’t think of one time the students were treated with anything but respect. And I’ve probably done hundreds of interviews before getting the assignment, and most sources say yes.

Here’s my trick: When I write or call the source, I say something like this: “Hello! My name is Linda Formichelli, and I’m a freelance writer based in New Hampshire. I’m working on a proposal for Health magazine for an article on common period problems and how to solve them. Would you be available for just five minutes so I can interview you to get a few quotes for my proposal? Then, if I get the assignment, we can set a more in-depth interview.”

Notice that I name the magazine I’m pitching; I think this sounds better than telling the source that you’re working on a pitch you’ll send who-knows-where. Also, I make sure to say “proposal” and not “query,” because I don’t think most people outside of the freelancing world know what a query is. Finally, I ask for just five minutes of the source’s time. That’s hard to say no to — and often the source will end up chatting with me for longer than that. (However, when I say five minutes, I mean it — if the source needs to hang up after five minutes, that’s fine.)

As for how to vet your sources, that’s a more difficult question. Some people become experts because they call themselves experts. And some sources have something to sell, whether it’s a product or a viewpoint, so no matter what question you ask it will come around again to that product or viewpoint.

I tend to look for expert sources in the following places:

* Professional schools: For example, a well-known business school or medical school. Contact their PR department to ask for sources, or go directly to the school’s website and read through the bios of the faculty members.

* Associations: Organizations like the American Dietetic Association and the American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons (yes, I used them recently) can often put you in contact with knowledgeable sources. Just look up the topic you’re writing about and “association” in Google.

* Amazon.com: I usually assume that anyone who has authored a book on a topic can be considered an expert. However, I always check the publishing house to make sure the book is not self-published. I have nothing against self-published books, but anyone can write one and there are no barriers to entry, while with traditional publishers you have at least some reassurance that the author has been accepted by a board of editors, a

I’ve been reading Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. It’s a fascinating look at how we tend to make decisions with our emotional minds rather than with our rational minds, and how we can unite those two minds to create big changes.

One of the ideas for solving problems and creating change is to look for “bright spots” in a situation. Instead of figuring out what went wrong and how to fix it, they say, we should figure out what went right — and do more of it.

For example, the authors tell the story of Jerry Sternin, who was working with Save the Children to help abolish malnutrition in children in rural areas of Vietnam, with little money and less manpower. If he were to try to fix what was wrong, he would be quickly overwhelmed. So instead, Sternin looked for the bright spots — kids who were doing well — and talked to their mothers to find out what they were doing. He discovered that they were feeding their kids four meals per day rather than two, and feeding them foods that other mothers rejected as being “low class,” but were actually very nutritious. Once Sternin found out how moms with healthy kids were doing it, it was a matter of teaching the malnourished families how to create healthful meals.

I’ve been thinking about how this related to our jobs as writers. Many of us get a rejection letter from an editor and expend a lot of energy trying to figure out what was wrong with our query and how to make it better next time. But how many of us examine our successes — the queries that sold — to determine how we can replicate that success? And how much likely are we to ruminate over an interview gone bad than to think about what made an interview go well?

Some motivational professionals also call this capitalizing on your strengths. It’s much easier and more productive to find out what you’re good at and do more of that than to try to fill every chink in your armor. Yet, for some reason, we’re always being told to identify and shore up our weaknesses.

It seems to be human nature to focus on the negative. We’ve all had the experience of letting one bad student evaluation or book review eclipse a dozen good ones, or letting one rude driver ruin an otherwise nice day. But it can help our careers to seek out, examine, and replicate the bright spots in our queries, interviews, interactions with editors, and so on.

Here’s an assignment: The next time something goes right in your career, ask yourself why you got such a good result. For example, did you use an edgier tone than usual in your query? Did you ask more open-ended questions in your interview, or start the talk out with a few minutes of chatting about the weather to warm the source up? Then, apply what you learned to future queries, interviews, etc. and see what happens. [lf]

This guest post is by Elaine Grant, a former editor at Inc. magazine, a longtime freelance writer, and the health and science reporter for New Hampshire Public Radio.

I’ve now taught my eight-week class, “Magazine Writing Basics,” several times. And I’ve noticed a pattern: my students tend to get stuck when they get to that point in the class where they have to interview sources. My theory is this: it’s about fear. Many, many people – especially newer writers — freeze when they consider picking up the phone and asking a stranger for his or her time. For some people, it’s even harder when that stranger is, say, an elected official, a celebrity, or a CEO.

And it can be intimidating. In my last session, I had a really smart, provocative 18-year old student. He had dropped out of high school and gotten his GED, and was already making money as a freelance copy editor. He wanted to learn journalism, and he had a great idea for a story about how public education should be remade to reduce the dropout rate. But he was stymied by the need to interview officials – senators, school board members, and the like. He was afraid that they wouldn’t take him seriously—or even talk to him — because he was so young. And so he didn’t try. He’ll never know whether they would have talked to him or not.

I think most would have. And I’m sure that 11 year-old Damon Weaver does too.

Damon Weaver has a lot to teach us adults. He’s the smiling, confident sixth grader who interviewed Barack Obama about education, bullying and school lunches. He’d previously interviewed several well-known people, including Colin Powell and Vice President Joe Biden, as he explained to NPR reporter Robert Siegel. He’d been trying for months to get an interview with the president. When at first he didn’t succeed – well, you know the rest. He didn’t assume that no meant “never.” In fact, in the audience at an Obama event, he held up a banner requesting an interview. Because it didn’t materialize immediately, he said, “The president must not have seen my banner.” He didn’t feel that the president didn’t consider him worthy of an interview, but rather, that if Obama had actually seen his request, he would have granted it. Which, of course, Obama eventually did.

I’ve been a journalist for more than 20 years, and at this point, I’ve interviewed CEOs and scientists, senators and governors, drug dealers and undercover cops – the list goes on. Still, I wish I’d had half of Damon Weaver’s confidence and persistence even five years ago – because these are key characteristics of a great reporter. And great reporting is, of course, the foundation for great nonfiction writing. Get past fear – of reaching out to sources, of handling yourself at a press conference, of writing the first sentence on a blank page – and you’re halfway toward doing great work.

Need a little inspiration and support of your own? Sign up for the next session of my e-course, “Magazine Writing Basics.” It starts September 14.

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Dan Baum has written for Rolling Stone, Playboy, Wired, and other big-name magazines, and is a former staff writer for The New Yorker; on his website, you can download proposals that landed assignments with these magazines. Baum is the author of Nine Lives, and runs a blog called WordWork. The account of his “short career at The New Yorker“ ran as a series of Tweets in May. Thanks to writer Greg Korgeski, who supplied some of the questions.

Many freelancers fantasize about doing the kinds of pieces that you’ve written. What does it take to succeed in that kind of long-form journalism?

The biggest mistake I see other freelancers make is that they don’t work hard enough. I know that seems odd because if feels like we all work really hard. But it always seemed to me that getting the assignment was the hard part; researching and writing the story is the easy part.

The trick is, proposals have to be really detailed. You have to do a substantial amount of the reporting and the writing just to get the assignment. So you’ve got to be clever about that, because if you spend weeks working on a proposal, you’re going to go broke because you might not sell the story.

On the other hand, if you don’t make the proposal really good, really dense, really packed with information and really well thought out, you’re not going to get the assignments. I’ve been doing this now since 1987, that’s 22 years, and I still write proposals that don’t sell. My website has a bunch of them.

Somebody pointed out on some blog that if you read my proposals that did sell and my proposals that didn’t sell, you’d be hard pressed to tell which is which, because there’s just a lot of luck in this business.

Margaret [my wife] and I used to do freelance for newspapers when we were living in Africa and in Montana, and they would only pay us like $150 per story, but they might also pay a little bit of travel expenses. So we would use the reporting that we did for the newspaper story to finance the writing of a magazine proposal; but it’s always this balancing act between doing enough work on a proposal to sell it but not so much that you’re doing too much work for free.

Generally, by the time I get an assignment, a third of the research is done, and at the very least, I know the parameters of where the research is going to take me and I have a sense of the universe of sources and documents that are going to be available. So I can pretty quickly and easily get the story reported and written.

It may be that you don’t need to do that. I’ve never had much success writing shorter proposals. This is just what works for me, and it’s not necessarily what works for everybody. I don’t want anybody to think that I’m saying that these are the be-all-end-all of story proposals, there are plenty up on the site that haven’t worked.

Well, you’re going to laugh because I cowrote a book called The Renegade Writer about breaking the rules of freelancing, and one of the rules you read in all the writing books is that your queries have to be one page long. But when I started writing longer pitches, I started getting into the national magazines.

Portfolio had a rule that all proposals had to be one page, and Portfolio just went out of business. I don’t think they went out of business because they demanded one-page proposals; I think they went out of business because they didn’t have a very clear vision of what the magazine was. But maybe their insistence on one-page proposals was indicative of a short attention span and a certain amount of panic that things had to move so fast. And that was a monthly, so they could have really taken their time.

Your proposals are a lot of work. When you come up with a proposal idea, do you target it only to one magazine or do you say “if it doesn’t work for magazine A I’m going to send it to magazine B”?

Well, you have to write a proposal for the sensibilities of a particular magazine, so when people tell me “I have an idea for a story,” my first question is “You have an idea for a story for what magazine?” Because you can’t say, “I have an idea for a story, and if I can’t sell it Playboy I’m going to sell it to Rolling Stone, and if I can’t sell it to Rolling Stone I’m going to sell it to Harper’s,” because it just doesn’t work that way.

The story and the magazine go together and it’s very hard to re-write a proposal that doesn’t sell at one magazine for another magazine. I don’t think I’ve ever done that.

If you don’t sell that story to the magazine you originally have in mind, probably the smartest thing to do is put it aside, cut your losses, and go on to the next thing. Some people may try to recycle proposals for different magazines; I don’t think I’ve ever been able to do it.

Do you think that’s only for the type of writing you do? Because if I don’t sell something to Family Circle then I’m tweaking that thing for Woman’s Day.

It may be. I want to keep saying this that this is just my experience. Family Circle and Woman’s Day might be similar enough. In the small number of magazines that I wrote for, you just couldn’t do it. I mean, if you were writing a proposal for Wired, there’s just nobody else you could sell it to. I tried, I’ve tried, I really have. I really have tried and it just never worked for me.

What does it take to make it — what kind of interests and background do you need to be able to do the kind of journalism that you do? What is your background?

I worked for six years in newspapers and then we’ve been freelancing ever since. What does it take? I used to say that for people getting out of college, working at a newspaper is great training, but newspaper jobs are getting hard to get.

I think it takes relentlessness. When I’m starting to work on a story, I’ll start reading about something, and I’ll just follow every link, and as I’m doing it I’ll make a list in a Word document of the people that I need to find.

I start calling them immediately, and talking to them and taking notes on my computer. The expression I use with Margaret is “I had a red dog day today,” which means I had my nose down on the ground and I was going after everything today. Just hoovering in enormous amounts of information. And when I start a proposal, I try to have a series of red dog days where I am just relentless, going after everybody, and as soon as I encounter somebody’s name I pick up the phone and I call. When I finish the interview I say, Who else should I talk to? Then I call those people.

I don’t put it off — I don’t say these are people I’m going to call later — I do it right then. Man, there are times when in one day I can get enough information to write a proposal that will get me a $12,000 magazine assignment.

When you are calling people and you don’t have an assignment yet, how do you convince them to talk to you?

I say, “I’m working on a story for The New York Times Magazine.” Or “I’m working on a story for Wired magazine.”

So you don’t let them know you don’t have the assignment in hand?

No, I say I’m working on a story for Wired magazine and I am. My relationship with Wired magazine at that point is none of their business.

What do you do if they ask when the publication date is?

I say “I don’t know, that’s out of my hands; it’s above my pay grade.”

On to another topic: You have such a broad range of things that you write about. How do you know, when you come up with an idea, that it’s going to fly? If it’s already all over the Internet, how do you know it isn’t already too much in the public consciousness for somebody to want to run it?

Yeah, that’s what you always face. I want to write a story about Masdar, which is this city being built in Abu Dhabi — a zero energy city being built from scratch. I thought this would be a great story for Wired.

It turned out Wired never heard of it but they said they were suffering from Abu Dhabi fatigue — they have too many stories on Abu Dhabi. Then I tried to talk to The New York Times Magazine and didn’t get anywhere. So I dropped it. It’s a great story, but I just dropped it.

I look for stories with interesting people in them, and one of the tricks that I’m always trying to impress upon young writers is that when you’re interviewing somebody, like if I was interviewing the chief solar engineer at Masdar, a big mistake people make is talking to that guy only about solar engineering. You have to throw in questions that have nothing to do with the subject. How many siblings do you have and what number are you? What do you read? What are your hobbies? Are you married? How many kids do you have? Have you ever been divorced? You’ve got to get them talking about themselves. I’m asking these questions that are just none of my business, really personal questions, and I’ll just keep getting in closer and closer and closer.

I’ll ask, What do you earn? And you’ll see this kind of shock of recognition on the person’s face. Sometimes people say “Well, that’s none of your business,” but rarely. I can barely think of a time that’s happened to me. Usually you see the shock of recognition when the person goes, “Oh, that’s the level we’re talking on.”

People like it, when you get them talking about themselves and unrelated stuff. You need time for this, and it’s a hard thing to do on the phone. But when you’re getting all of that then you know this person as a whole person, and then you can fit them into the story in a way that you’re still writing about Masdar and solar engineering, but you can just throw in a few licks to just make that person real.

It’s kind of a New Yorker trick. When you read about people in The New Yorker, they are somehow more three-dimensional than sources in other magazines. They’re not just a font of quotes, or a representative of a point of view — they’re people.

You also mentioned that you pick up the phone and call people. How do you find them?

Oh, people are easy to find. On the net, you can Google them, and you may not find their phone number but you’ll find organizations that they’ve been attached to. It may take two or three calls. I just tracked down Oliver North and it took three or four phone calls.

It takes a certain relentlessness. It takes not being discouraged. Sometimes you’ve got to call 40 people until you find the right one. If you’re looking for somebody’s who’s obscure, you use an online phone book. If you know Mark Riseman lives somewhere in the Midwest, and you look up Mark Riseman and up come with 400 of them, you’ve got to go through and call all the ones that are in the Midwest. That can take an hour and a half and it’s tedious, but you’ll find him. That’s what I’m talking about a red dog day. You just have your nose down on the ground, and you’re on the trail all day.

Do you worry about competition — other writers coming in and horning in on your gigs?

No. For one thing, we’re kind of out of magazines. I think in a way, it’s over. I think the days of being able to make a living as a magazine writer are rapidly coming to a close.

That is so sad.

It is. I’m not boasting here, but I should be able to get work, right? I was on staff to The New Yorker for 3 years, I worked for Rolling Stone for a long time. I have written for the biggest and most prestigious magazines out there and I can’t get work. Magazines are closing, they’re shrinking, they’re going from 12 issues a year to 10 issues a year, and they’re going from 300 pages to 140 pages.

Some of them are cutting their rates.

Some of them are cutting their rates. You know, when we started magazine work in 1989, a dollar a word was middling pay. A lot of magazines are still paying $1 a word.

And for a lot of freelancers, that’s the Holy Grail. “If I get $1 a word, that means I’ve made it.”

Yeah, well that’s what we were getting in 1989. But you know that whole question of dollars per word is a terrible way to judge an assignment.

You really have to think in dollars per hour. Is that how you do it?

I think of dollars per assignment. This is kind of dollars per hour…if a magazine assignment is going to pay me $3000, then I can figure out exactly how many days I can work on that. The LA Times Magazine is a pretty good outlet for me. They paid a dollar a word but they took 5,000-word stories; I could work on that for two or three weeks, and make a living. I don’t care; it’s just as easy for me to write 5,000 words as it is for me to write 2,000 words. In some ways it’s easier. So I don’t worry about competition. People tell me that they like seeing my pitches, and it helps them. If it helps other people, if it improves the quality of writing out there, if it helps younger reporters get started, I’m happy to do it.

How do you feel about what’s going on in the industry?

My sense is this — and this may be optimistic — I think we writers are in for a few bad years, because right now the public is used to getting everything for free. So the magazines are dying and the newspapers are dying and the quality of work is going to decline because nobody has yet figured out how to get the public to pay for quality reporting.

I don’t know how long it’s going to take for the public to say we really miss reading the results of two and three weeks worth of investigative work, and that’s worth paying for. Somebody will figure out a business model to get people to pay for it. Then I think we’re going to be a golden era in journalism. I think it’s going to be spectacular some day.

When newspapers and magazines and even book publishers are no longer saddled with the expense of manufacturing, handling, and shipping atoms, it’s going to free up a huge amount of money and I think it’s going to let a whole lot more people get into this business — and there are going to be a whole lot more venues to write for, and it’s going to be great.

I think we’re going to go through a swale of no work. Until the public figures out that it has to pay for quality research and writing, we’re going to face some lean years.

I’m being optimistic. Maybe the public will never say that, maybe quality journalism is over. I kind of don’t think so.

The paper The New York Times is going to disappear; all papers are going to vanish. I don’t worry about that — I don’t really care what medium people are reading in, if it’s a Kindle or if it’s a reader, I don’t think that’s the issue. I think the issue is, how do we get the public to pay for quality research and writing? Nobody’s figured that out yet because right now the public is excited about getting all this stuff for free. It’s just going to take a little while and I don’t know how long it’s going to take.

Some day it’s going to be great for us.

I hope it’s soon…I make my living almost 100% from magazines.

Yes, we make our living 100% from our freelance writing. I’m 53, Margaret is 55, and right now it feels like we’re back at the beginning of our careers.

It’s scary, but it’s kind of exciting in a way.

Well, it’s exciting when I think about what’s going to follow this period. Although yesterday the Times had a story about digital book piracy, and that’s going to be a problem.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff out there to write about — we just have to figure out how to get the public to pay for it.

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One of my e-course students asked me how to know if an idea will fly before you start putting a lot of work into it. For example, say you come up with the idea “10 Reasons It’s Good to Be Bad,” about the benefits of letting your wild side show. Before you pitch, you need to figure out: Are there really any benefits to being bad? And if so, will you be able to come up with enough reasons to make a full article?

As a writer, part of your job is to vet your own ideas…to figure out what will work and what won’t. Sometimes, true, you end up getting an assignment on an idea you and the editor thought would work and you later find out that it that you can’t support the idea. But you want to avoid that situation as much as possible, and that means doing research before you pitch an idea.

That’s one of the reasons I suggest doing brief interviews for the query. The interviews do more than boost your query by showing your editor that you know how to find appropriate sources and get good quotes — they also let you test out your idea. Are you able to find sources who can talk about your idea? Are sources telling you your idea doesn’t make sense?

It can be difficult, especially for new writers, to get sources to do interviews before you have an actual assignment. Here’s what I do: I call or e-mail the source and say, “I’m working on an article proposal for Wonderful Woman magazine on why it’s good to be bad. Would you be interested in participating in a very brief interview on this topic? It shouldn’t take more than ten minutes. Then, if I get the assignment, I’ll contact you to set a more in-depth interview.” I have had very, very few people refuse this request.

Renegade readers, how do you ensure your idea will fly before you write up your query? Please post your advice in the Comments below! [lf]

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This article was originally published in Writer’s Digest.

Whenever I ask aspiring magazine writers why they don’t get started writing queries, they say the same thing: “I’m afraid of interviewing people.” And their fears aren’t unfounded — I’ve written for over 100 magazines and have probably interviewed more than 1,000 people in the past seven years, and every once in a while even I’m still stumped by the silent source or the interviewee who talks so much that I spend more in cassette tape than I make on the article.

Case in point: I recently had to interview the general manager of an amusement park for a trade magazine. Try as I might, I could not drag any useful information out of this guy. “What’s your park’s attendance?” “Not allowed to say.” “How many people do you employ?” “That’s top-secret information.” “How much did it cost to build that new ride?” “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.” Because I was unable to get the information I needed, the article was killed — and I haven’t been asked to write for that publication since.

Even the most hard-boiled journalist breaks into a cold sweat when faced with interviews like this. So I spoke with four talented writers who are masters at the craft of talking up their sources to find out how to handle the interviewee from the Ninth Circle.

#1 Run-On Ralph

We’ve all had an interviewee who, when asked about the health benefits of carrots, launches into a half-hour monologue about how his mother used to force him to eat carrots when he was young, even though he hated them, and ever since then he can’t tolerate the color orange, and now Halloween decorations cause him to hyperventilate, and…

Stop! Here are some tactics for keeping the Run-On Ralph on topic:

* Set a time. Let your source know up front how much time you’ve set aside for the interview so he can time his answers accordingly. Also, “I let the source know that this is an article I have to turn around in 48 hours — even if it’s due in a month,” says Myatt Murphy, a former fitness editor for Men’s Health and a freelance writer who’s written for Cosmopolitan, Prevention, Esquire, and others. If the interviewee has a sense of urgency, he tends to focus a lot faster.

* Flatter him. If your source still runs off at the mouth and over his allotted time, appeal to his vanity: “This information is so interesting, and I wish I had more time to interview you, but I have five more questions I need to ask and I don’t want to use up all your valuable time.”

* Do your research. Chances are, someone has already covered what you’re about to write, and you can find this info online. “From this, you can get a general sense of what principle things you want to discuss,” says Murphy. “That will help you focus the interview.”

* Take it online. Tell the interviewee that you’re very sorry, but you misjudged the amount of time the interview would take — and would he mind if you e-mailed him the remaining questions?

*Cut it short. “I try to politely cut them off,” says Monique Cuvelier, who has written for such magazines as Family Circle, Portable Computing, and Psychology Today. “When they get off track, I interject a lot of “Uh huh” and “Yes” so that when I do interrupt with a question, it’s not out of the blue.” She then steers the interview back on track with a relevant question.

#2 The Wrong Guy

You’re in the middle of an interview and you realize that the person you’re talking to is completely inappropriate for your article. The source’s PR rep told you that she was a nutrition expert, but you discover that she actually sells herbal Viagra over the Internet. Here’s how to ditch the dud:

* Let her down easy. Cuvelier usually says, “I’m so sorry, but I think I misunderstood what your expertise is. I’m afraid I just wasted part of your morning.” “I take the responsibility on myself,” she explains. “They’re not my boss, so I’m not concerned about being self-deprecating in front of them.”

* Say “buh-bye.” If the source is actually trying to sneak her way into an article she knows she’s not appropriate for (believe me, it happens), she may not let you go so easily. In that case, as soon as you realize that the source is a no-go for your article, it’s best to tell her that she’s answered all your questions, thank you very much. Then give her a disclaimer: “I have to let you know that just because I do an interview, it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be quoted in the article — though I’ll try my best.”

#3 The Product Plugger

No matter what question you ask, the Product Plugger manages to turn the answer into an ad for his product, service, or company. “What should small business owners do to attract talented employees?” “Well, if you have a great product like our automatic peach defuzzer, which retails for the low, low price of $19.95, the employees will come flocking to your door.” “How should small business owners price their products?” “They should price them low, like our automatic peach defuzzer, which retails at the low, low price of $19.95.” Here’s how to de-program the Product Plugger:

* Boost his ego. Say something like, “Your peach defuzzer is so wonderful and successful, you must have done a lot of research into the market. Do you have any insider comments on X?” That way, you’ve already gotten the product plug out of the way so the source can answer your question minus the self-promotion.

* Blame the editor. “What I say is, ‘Look, this will never make it past my editor,’” says Juliet Pennington, a reporter for the Sun-Chronicle of Attleboro, MA, a freelance travel writer for the Boston Herald, and a writing teacher at Curry College in Milton, MA. Tell the source that you’ll be sure to mention his product, but that blatant pitches will be cut by the editor. If he wants his quotes to appear at all, he’ll have to tone it down.

* Paraphrase. If all else fails, do what Cuvelier does to salvage the interview and paraphrase your source’s answers. “I present the quote to them: ‘Would you agree that X, Y, and Z?’” she says “Then if I use a quote, I look for punchy two or three word phrases.”

#4 The Blow-Off

If a person agreed to an interview, you’d expect that when you called, she’d be there panting with anticipation — right? Sorry to disillusion you, but that’s not always the case. Sources get called away on emergencies, or they forget to record the interview in their calendars, or sometimes they’re just not that interested in being interviewed. Follow this advice to corral a source who flakes out on you:

* Commit her. When Jennifer Lawler, author of more than 20 books including Dojo Wisdom for Writers: 100 Simple Ways to Become a More Inspired, Successful and Fearless Writer, was stymied by a no-show source, “The next time I had to interview a source, I got her to answer a question or two during my first contact [to set up the interview],” she explains. Not only does this tactic give you an idea of whether the source if truly interested in being interviewed, but it also makes the source feel invested in the scheduled interview. “They feel like they know me a little more, and it’s harder to blow me off,” Lawler says. You can ask your preliminary questions either via phone or e-mail.

* Diversify. If you have just one source and she blows you off, you’re up the creek. Try to have one source for every 500 words plus one extra for good measure. So a 1,500-word article will have four sources. Even if one of them ends up being a no-show, you’re still in good shape.

#5 The Monosyllabic Marvel

This is the source who can’t or won’t respond to your questions, grunting “Yes” or “No” to every query or dancing around your questions without actually spitting out an answer. Use these tips to get the words flowing:

* De-scarify it. When Cuvelier schedules an interview, she doesn’t call it an interview, which can conjure up scary images of Barbara Walters peppering sources with incriminating questions. Instead, she calls it a “chat.” And when she’s doing the interview — er, chat — she doesn’t say things like, “Okay, question number five…” or “My next question is…” She transitions into her questions naturally to keep the conversation flowing. One good way to do that is to say, “That’s so interesting. And what about X?”

* Warm him up. Try starting with some warm-up questions that will help ease the source into the interview. Some good ones are, “How’s the weather where you are?” and “How about those Knicks?” If you have anything in common with the source — maybe you both had teenage daughters or you recently visited his home town — bring it up. Once he starts feeling more relaxed, you can hit him with the more relevant questions, like, “Is it true that your company is dumping chemicals into the public water supply?”

* Go virtual. If you sense that the interviewee is uncomfortable being interviewed, you can do what Lawler does and ask if he’d feel better doing an e-mail interview. “Some people really are more comfortable responding in print,” Lawler says.

* Be quiet. “A lot of people, like me with my Type-A personality, have trouble with silence,” says Pennington. “Sometimes someone is just formulating their thoughts, but you’re already onto the next thing because there was a two-second pause.” So maybe your interviewee isn’t reticent — you just aren’t giving give him a chance to respond.

* Prep him. For some articles, you can send the source the questions ahead of time so he can prepare himself.

* Be humble. “My philosophy is that the source doesn’t have to be talking to me,” says Cuvelier. “So I’m humble, and I think that takes me pretty far. I thank the source profusely and try to remember how busy these people are and how nice it is for them to be taking this time out of their day.”

#6 The Expert

You’ve scored an interview with the foremost expert on your topic. Huzzah! But when you interview her, she talks so far over your head that she might as well be speaking Farsi. Here’s how to bring the expert down to your — and your readers’ — level:

* Explain your readers. Tell the expert that the audience you’re writing for doesn’t understand the topic as well as she does. Ask her, “If you had to simplify this for a patient/client/child, how would you explain it?”

* Spell it out. If the expert hits you with a word like “tetrahydrodipicolinate,” don’t fake it — ask her to spell it for you.

* Say it again, Sam. “When they throw out a word you don’t know, repeat it,” says Murphy. “Sometimes you have interviews where you listen to the tape and you’ve coughed halfway through the word and you have no idea what they said.” If you repeat it, then you’ve heard the word a couple of times — and the expert can correct you if you get it wrong.

These tips will help you become an ace interviewer who can handle even the most problematic interviewees like a pro — and get the info you need to make your articles sparkle. As for me, I can’t wait to try out these talk-producing tricks on my next Monosyllabic Marvel. [lf]

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“I dread days where I have interviews scheduled.” “I’d rather give myself a root canal than call an editor.” “I’m so much better on paper than I am on the phone.” I’ve heard this, and variations thereof, from dozens of freelancers, many of whom are extremely successful professionals with hundreds of clips to their names.

I admit, my pulse rate goes up a little before calling sources, but it’s a good thing for me: I use that energy to project enthusiasm into our interview. Within a couple minutes of talking, my heart rate slides back to normal. Only once did I really and truly dread an interview, and that was because I was cold-calling Jeffrey Steingarten at the behest of one of my editors. If you know anything about Steingarten, you know why my armpits were drenched: mercifully, the interview went well.

If you’re on the path to a long and successful career as a freelancer magazine writer, the phone isn’t something you can avoid. Most writers I know conduct the majority of the interviews with it, and when you need a quick, immediate response from an editor, it can’t be beat. If you’ve been freelancing for awhile and you can’t shake the jitters, some tips from someone who kinda enjoys conversations with interesting people:

• Your source is probably more nervous speaking to you than you are speaking to him, so focus on putting him at ease rather than focusing on your insecurity. Remember, he’s worrying about how he’s going to sound to you — after all, those are his words that will end up between quotation marks in a national magazine.
• Schedule interviews for the first thing in the morning. So many productivity experts advise writers to get their creative work done first thing, but there’s another train of thought that says it pays to get your “frogs” out of the way first. I know I feel much more energized when the tough stuff is off my plate (in fact, I always eat the least compelling food on my plate, and save the yummy stuff for last!)
• Set one day a week to do all your interviews. This can be helpful if you work yourself up into a tizzy before each interview. You get them all done in one fell swoop and relax for the rest of the week.
• Call sources on the fly. This can work if you spend the week looking in calendar in dreadful anticipation of an interview. I do this a lot, especially with people who can be hard to reach. I ask them for a few minutes of their time, and usually they give it to me. And then I’m done!
• Identify and write down what it is about phone work that gives you the heebie-jeebies. Do you stumble when you speak? Are you afraid the person on the other end of the line will treat you badly? Is it hard for you to write and conduct interviews at the same time?
• Now write down some ideas to help you get over those fears. If you feel inarticulate, write out a script for your call, right down to your introduction, and practice it out loud before you call. Write out a sign with the words, “Speak Slowly” and post it in front of you. If someone gives you attitude, you can ask them when it’s a better time to talk — or if it’s a source, you can find someone else (nicer) to talk to. Start taping your interviews, develop some shorthand, or tell sources ahead of time it helps if they speak slowly and that you’ll probably interrupt them to get a quote right.

Do you dread phone work? What tips and tricks do you use to help you get through your phone phobia? Post them below. [diana burrell]

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