Asking About Feeling Rather Than Fact
Launch library · evergreen read
Facts are usually available elsewhere: records, documents, other witnesses. What a subject alone can supply is how something felt to live through, and an interviewer who only asks for facts wastes the one resource that cannot be found anywhere else, which is a particular person's interior experience of an event. Facts alone can make an account feel complete while leaving its actual significance entirely untouched.
Feeling questions require care, since they can sound intrusive if asked too bluntly or too early. Framing them around a specific moment, rather than a general mood, tends to help: asking what went through someone's mind at a precise point is easier to answer than asking how an entire year felt. A precise moment gives a subject somewhere real to stand while describing something otherwise hard to name.
Done well, this kind of question produces the material that makes an interview worth reading rather than simply worth filing. The facts establish what happened; the feeling establishes why anyone beyond the immediate parties should care that it happened at all. Readers and listeners tend to remember exactly this kind of material long after the surrounding facts have faded.