Who Is This Stranger?

(Profile)

If you get to know them, most people have something going on that makes them notable.

This experience is centered around helping your audience understand what is notable about someone else. Your job is to “profile” your subject in a way that allows your audience to get to know them.

To do this, you will become a conduit for information. Your audience has no direct experience with the subject of your profile, so they’re relying on you to give a thorough and accurate portrayal. This isn’t to say you’re responsible for writing your subject’s life story—a profile is more of an introduction than the entire tale—but you do want your audience to walk away understanding what makes the person you’re profiling an interesting individual.

This will also require expert-level reading like a writer in order to familiarize yourself with the ins and outs, whys and wherefores, of writing a profile.

AUDIENCE

Your audience enjoys hearing about the lives of other people, and so is naturally inclined to start reading a piece they can readily identify as a profile, but at the same time they’re looking for interesting stories. Not any old profile will do. Think about capturing their interest and sustaining that interest throughout the profile.

PROCESS

1. Identify the subject and secure cooperation.

The first step is to choose someone to profile. The best plan is to choose someone you find interesting, since you can use your own interest to drive your investigations. The things you find fascinating may be interesting to your audience as well. This need not be someone famous or prominent. It just needs to be someone whose life or work you’re curious to know more about. Profiles tend to be either general, reflecting interest in this person for who they are, or a microcosm, meaning we’re interested in this person because of some aspect of their life or achievements.

You’ll need to get their permission to profile them, because you will need to be able to observe and interview them. I suppose it’s possible to do this without someone knowing you’re observing and interviewing them, but it would take the skills of a master spy to pull it off, so it’s easier just to ask someone if they’re open to having you dip into their lives for a little bit in order to help other people understand what it’s like to be them.

Make sure to be clear about how much time and access you’ll need. (Read through the entire process before you begin.) You don’t want to get partway through the process, then have them get irritated with how long it’s taking and rescind your access.

2. Identify and digest model profiles.

Profiles are easy to find. Magazines, newspapers, and websites publish profiles of people all the time. Find half a dozen examples and read them. Utilize your skills of response, observation, and analysis to uncover the tricks of the trade for how profiles work.

Audiences bring specific expectations to their reading of profiles. You want to understand those expectations so you can fulfill them. There may be some room for variation, but the interesting part of a profile is usually the subject itself, not how far the writer pushes the boundaries of the form. (Though there are, of course, exceptions.)

You should be able to see how profiles are structured, as well as what sort of information is usually included. For example, many profiles will include some history and background of the subject, as well as what’s known as “verbal portraiture,” a technique that quickly describes the person in a way that puts a mental picture of them in the audience’s mind.

Here is an example of the greatest verbal portraiture in the history of the English language, the opening sentence of Susan Orlean’s “Orchid Fever,” published in the New Yorker and later expanded into a book (The Orchid Thief) and even adapted into a movie.

John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth. He has the posture of al dente spaghetti and the nervous intensity of someone who plays a lot of video games.

See what I mean?

Try to identify the sorts of moves the authors make in your example profiles. It’s important to read at least several different profiles in order to understand the basic form as well as where you’re allowed to try out variations on the theme.

You’ll also want to note how the writer handles their own presence in the profile. In some cases, the profiler becomes a kind of character, a physical presence, rendered through the first person (I). In other cases, the profiler is more of an observer-commenter, obviously present but not seen or heard within the world of the person being profiled.

3. Gather background on your subject.

The first step in a profile is to gather as much readily available background information on your subject as possible. This will be extra important because when you start observing your subject, you will have some context for what you’re seeing, and when you interview them, you won’t have to ask a bunch of questions you already know the answer to. (Though you may want to confirm any important information that could wind up in the profile.)

4. Observe your subject.

Act like an anthropologist and spend some time watching what your subject does and how they do it in their natural habitat. Take notes on what you’re seeing, hearing etc. You should also include your subjective impressions of the subject, since you’re trying to create a rounded picture of the whole person. Try to be as unobtrusive as possible. If things occur about which you’re curious and have questions, file those away for the interview.

5. Interview your subject.

Once you’ve had a chance to observe your subject, arrange for a time to sit down for a more formal interview. It need not be long, but you will want to speak to them directly. Make sure to plan ahead of time what you want to ask and arrange to record the exchange (with the subject’s permission). The more planning and preparation, the better the interview. Your background research and observations may give you sufficient material for your questions, but if you’re feeling stuck, look at your model profiles for the kinds of questions those writers ask. Or explore any of the approximately ten zillion interview-based podcasts out there for inspiration.

6. Review your material.

Before drafting, take some time to go back over all you’ve gathered. Even for a short profile like you’re doing here, you’ll find you’ve gathered a tremendous amount of stuff, and it helps to take a minute and remind yourself of what you have.

7. Draft the profile.

As always, remember your audience as you write your initial draft. Hook them at the beginning, and deliver on that promise through the remainder of the profile. If you find yourself getting stuck, go back to the model profiles to see how they work. If you’re having trouble with flow, just write a bunch of individual paragraphs you feel are interesting all by themselves. Later you can go back and arrange these bits and link them together.

8. Test your draft.

Ask a test reader or two to read the profile and rate it on a scale of one to ten, with one being, “I’d rather jam knitting needles into my own eyes than to have to read this profile again,” and ten being, “Nuclear Armageddon could have been exploding all around me and still I couldn’t have stopped reading this profile.”

After the rating, ask the test reader to give you a sentence or two of feedback explaining their rating.

9. Revise, edit, polish.

Based on the feedback from your test audience, as well as your own reflection on your draft, revise the profile to completion.

REFLECT

For me, the most difficult part of this kind of writing is approaching the subject and then doing the interview. By nature I’m a bit shy and don’t like to impose myself on people, and while I enjoy learning about others, the interviews can often seem sort of awkward, with the subject feeling self-conscious about being interviewed, and me feeling self-conscious about grilling them.

But over time, I’ve become much better at overcoming these predispositions. A lot of it is simply repetition—what was once scary has become less so with frequent exposure. I’ll always feel some anxiety about this kind of work, but I no longer let that anxiety stop me from doing what I need to do.

In many ways, as I look back and reflect, I seem like a whole different person. As a student, I was always hesitant to raise my hand and share in class, not because I thought I might have a wrong answer, but because I just didn’t want the attention, even if I was right.

Now, as a teacher and sometime public speaker, I may be presenting to hundreds of people at a time, their attention on me and my ideas. Even thinking about doing this can bring back a measure of anxiety, but I’ve done it often enough I know that I will be able to do it again.

And doing things that do not come naturally can feel pretty empowering. I am not a whole different person. I am the same shy kid I’ve always been. I now know how to take care of that shy kid while not letting him stop me from something I want to do.

This is a roundabout way of asking you reflect on the role anxiety may have played in your writing practice and see if you can identify ways you’ve developed to address these anxieties.