Excerpted from "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser 5th Edition Harper Perennial

Get people talking. Learn to ask questions that will elicit answers about what is more interesting or vivid in their lives. Nothing so animates writing as someone telling what he thinks or what he does-in his own words.

His own words will always be better than your words, even if you are the most elegant stylist in the land. They carry the inflection of his speaking voice and the idiosyncrasies of how he puts a sentence together. They contain the regionalisms of his conversation and the lingo of his trade. They convey his enthusiasms. This is a person talking to the reader directly, not through the filter of a writer. As soon as a writer steps in, everyone else's experience becomes secondhand.

Therefore learn how to conduct an interview. Whatever form of nonfiction you write, it will come alive in proportion to the number of quotes you can weave into is as you go along. Often you'll find yourself embarking on an article so apparently lifeless-the history of an institution or some local issue such as storm sewers-that you will quail at the prospect ofd keeping your readers, or even yourself awake.

Take heart. You'll find the solution if you look for the human element. Somewhere in every drab institution are men and women who have a fierce attachment to what they are doing and are rich repositories of lore. Somewhere behind every storm sewer is a politician whose future hangs on getting it installed and a widow who has always lived on the block and is outraged that some damn-fool legislator thinks it will wash away. Find these people to tell your story and it won't be drab.

Interviewing is one of those skills you can only get better at. You will never again feel so ill at ease as when you try it for the first time, and probably you'll never feel entirely comfortable prodding another person for answers he or she may be too shy or too inarticulate to reveal. But at least half of the skill mechanical. The rest is instinct-knowing how to make the other person relax, when to push, when to listen, when to stop. This can all be learned with experience.

The basic tools for an interview are paper and two or three well sharpened pencils or pens. Is that insultingly obvious advice? You'd be surprised how many writers venture forth to stalk their quarry with no pencil, or with one that breaks, or with a pen that doesn't work, and with nothing to write on. Be prepared.

But keep your notebook out of sight until you need it. There's nothing less likely to relax a person than the arrival of a stranger with a notepad and pen. Both of you need time to get to know each other. Take a while just to chat, gauging what sort of person you're dealing with, getting him or her to trust you.

Never go to an interview without doing whatever homework you can. If you are interviewing a town official, know his or her voting record. If it's an actress, know hat plays or movies she has been in. You will be resented if you inquire about facts you could have learned in advance.

Make a list of likely questions-it will save you the vast embarrassment of going dry in mid-interview. Perhaps you won't need the list; better questions will occur to you, or the people being interviewed will veer off at an angle you couldn't have foreseen. Here you can only go by intuition. If they stray hopelessly off the subject, drag them back. If you like the new direction, follow along and forget the questions you intended to ask.

Tape Recorder:

Speaking of tools, is it all right to use a tape recorder? Why not just take one along, start it going, and forget all that business of pencil and paper?

Obviously the tape recorder is a superb instrument for capturing what people have to say-especially people who, for reasons of their culture or temperament, would never get around to writing it down. In the realm of social history and anthropology the machine is invaluable.

Strictly, however, this is writing. It's a process of asking questions and then pruning and splicing and editing the answers, and it takes endless time and labor. The seemingly simple use of a tape recorder isn't simple.

One hazard is that tape recorders malfunction. Few moments in journalism are as glum as the return of a reporter with "a really great story," followed by his pushing of the PLAY button and silence. But above all, a writer should be able to see his materials. If your interview is on tape you become a listener, forever fussing with the machine, running it backward to find the brilliant remark you can never find, running it forward, stopping, starting, driving yourself crazy. Be a writer. Write things down.

It's good to write, the direct involvement. The other person can see you working not just sitting there letting a machine do it for you.

Unfortunately, taking notes has one huge problem: the person you're interviewing often starts talking faster than you can write. You are still scribbling Sentence A when he zooms into Sentence B, meanwhile trying to hold the rest of Sentence A in your inner ear and hoping Sentence C will be a dud that you can skip altogether, using the time to catch up. Unfortunately, you now have your subject going at high speed. He is at last saying all the things you have been trying to cajole out of him for an hour, and saying them with eloquence. Your inner ear is clogging up with sentences you want to grab before they slip away.

Tell him to stop.

Just say, "Hold it a minute, please," and write until you catch up. What you are trying to do with your feverish scribbling, after all, is to quote him correctly , and nobody wants to be misquoted.

With practice you will write faster and develop some sort of shorthand. You'll find yourself devising abbreviations for often-used words and also omitting the small connective syntax. As soon as the interview is over, fill in all the missing words you can remember. Complete the uncompleted sentences. Most of them will still be lingering just within the bounds of recall.

When you get home or to the office, type out your notes so you can read them easily. This not only makes the interview accessible, along with the e clippings or other materials you may have assembled. It enables you to review in tranquility a torrent of words you wrote in haste, and thereby discover what the person really said.

Single out the sentences that are most important or colorful. You'll be tempted to use all the words that are in your notes because you performed the laborious chore of getting them all down. But that's a self-indulgence-no excuse for putting the reader to the same effort. Your job is to distill the essence. Your duty is to the reader.

• When was your org/company started?
• Who started your org/company?
• How old were you when you first started to work here?
• What skills did you need for this job?
• What inspired you to start working here in this job/position?How?
• Did you start this thing alone or did someone help you put the pieces together? Who was that person or persons?
• How long has your mother or father been a part of this org/company??
• What were your goals in life?
• Do you feel your org/company is a part of your goals?
• What did you want to be during the early years of your life?
• What do you see in the future for your org/company?
• What do you see in the future for yourself?
• What is the difference from this org/company and other org/companies?
• What can you say has changed from when this place first began to where it's at today?
• If you can change something from your past of being a part of this org/company what would it be?-How would you go about changing that-Why would you change them?
• Has this ______ affected your life emotionally? How?