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I don’t argue about the rights and wrongs of the situation. Or, if I do, I might say, “To be a devil’s
advocate, this is the way so-and-so might see it . . .” But I don’t see the point of getting into an
argument with someone I’m interviewing. In the middle sixties, an English politician who’d managed
to win an election in the Midlands through race-baiting threw me out of his house in the middle of an
interview. When a friend of mine on one of the London papers told a colleague about that, the
colleague said something like, “I thought Trillin was a better reporter than that.” When I thought about
that, I decided the colleague had a pretty good point: I missed whatever the politician would have
said after the moment he decided to throw me out.
Do you care in what order you interview people?
I try to save the most important people for last. I like to have talked to a lot of people, and learned
more about the central characters, before I talk to them.
You wrote roughly one “U.S. Journal” every three weeks for fifteen years. How did you manage
that?
I don’t know whether Mr. Shawn had it in his mind that I would be quite as rigid about handing
them in when he asked me to write the “U.S. Journal” stories. But that was the only way for me to do
it. I had to keep on a schedule and feel that it would be downright embarrassing for me not to hand in
a story at the end of three weeks. Otherwise I might have worked on one story forever.
I’d usually leave New York on a Sunday night. I’d get on the plane, have a drink or two, and think
about the story. I usually knew very little about the story. I didn’t do much preparation aside from
making sure that the central characters would be in town, and calling the local paper to see whether I
could use the clips.
That night or the next morning, when I woke up at my motel, I’d call home and say to my wife, “You
know what this story is really about? It’s about such and such.” By the time I called her I’d have some
pretty well-polished theories about the story, particularly if it had been a long plane ride. A week or
so later, when she read the first draft of the piece, she would say, “Remember that thing you told me
about the story when you first got there? Well, it isn’t in the piece.” And I’d have to explain to her that
my original idea had evaporated once I started reporting. Which is to say that if I have an idea about a
story at the beginning, I am usually wrong.
Is writing more enjoyable for you than reporting, or vice versa?
They’re intertwined—partly because writing is a lot easier when I’ve done a thorough job of
reporting. It’s a fairly simple formula: specific writing is obviously better than general writing. If I
don’t know enough to be specific, then it is hard to write. That is one of the reasons that even the most
brilliant editor can’t turn terrible copy into brilliant copy. He can only make it okay, because he
doesn’t have enough specific information about the story.
There are parts of both activities that I like and don’t like.