Interviewing Amal - how to spot an overworked aspiring journalist

It's the Sunday morning before this episode is meant to go out and I've only just recorded it yesterday. I'd rushed through writing up the questions, I'd had issues getting zoom to work, I'd only scheduled poor Amal in that day - everything felt like I was scrambling for something good. And now I've got the content, and I'm listening back to it, and I really wish I could do this interview all over again.

The worst thing about it is that for some reason I seem unable to ask a question (which unfortunately happens to be a pretty key skill in journalism). Like wow, just spit it out. Literally just ask the question. Something about just asking the question exactly as you've written it down feels very blunt, and I always worry that I'm making my guest feel uncomfortable if I don't pad the question up with fillers and pauses and hesitations. But who am I fooling? I'd sent Amal the questions in beforehand for her ease. She knew exactly how I'd written them down - and here I am taking 45 painful seconds to ask a question that is written out clear as day in front of me. Why?

I'm not exaggerating. Let me demonstrate the extent of this.

This is the question I had written out:

"How are you able to reconcile your modesty with being a progressive, modern woman in a society in which female liberation is tied to the exposure of the female body and the celebration of female sexuality?"

I like this question. It makes me sound smart. It's pretty snappy. It feels like it might yield an interesting response. And yet this is how I asked it, word for word:

"A lot of ... kind of feminist ideology is- is kind of tied to this idea that female liberation has to come from kind of celebrating your body and celebrating the fact that you can kind of expose it to whoever you want to and erm kind of at the same time a lot of, well, men will kind of use that to shame... women? And that's a very- very complicated kind of thing- kind of discourse that's happening at the moment and I'm just wondering how-how you're able to reconcile being kind of, you know, a modern progressive woman and also a hijabi muslim who kind of sees modesty as a really important part of her femininity."

Seeing it written out, it was actually way worse than I thought. Yuck. Writing out the transcript is going to be a nightmare.

I think it might be to do with the tone of the podcast. So far almost anyone who has listened to it has commented that they enjoy the conversational style. I've taken this at face value (though now I'm wondering whether that was a polite way of saying 'it's very chatty, isn't it?) and tried to inject every episode with that easy-listening sense of spontaneity. Now I'm realising that if the style obscures the meaning of the question or the answer, then it's doing more harm than good. From now on, clarity needs to come first.

Another thing I've noticed I keep doing is trying to fill the spaces between her answers and my next question with what I always think at the time is an acknowledgement of her answer, but it tends to come out just sounding like a vague, hollow repetition of what my guest has just said, only less articulate and less substantial. Cringe. I just cut these out entirely. They added literally nothing of worth to the episode. The fact that this one is nearly 10 minutes shorter than the other two says a lot about how much space I've been taking up doing just that. It doesn't help that I wasn't totally sure this time when I wanted to explore something further and when I should just leave it, so looking back, doing this was mostly a stalling technique, which I employed hoping to buy myself time to figure out what to do next. My feminism question is a good example of this - I had originally wanted to go into the idea of 'choice' or 'liberal' feminism and how it serves individuals but doesn't benefit the movement as a whole, but in practice it felt a little too aggressive. So I didn't bring it up, partially because I wasn't convinced it was relevant to her answer, and because I just didn't feel like I would properly be able to argue it anyway, but primarily because I didn't want Amal to be under the impression that I had brought her on the show to grill her about her beliefs. I think that's what makes this interview feel so unfocussed - I didn't take enough time to think about my questions before asking them, and I didn't consider which avenues I was willing to explore ahead of time, so that each new question felt disconnected from the response I'd just been given, and each response felt like it hadn't been explored and developed in the way it could have been.

How can I be honest with myself and with my audience about how I'm improving and progressing while still putting out content that is listenable and enjoyable? The solution I've reached after procrastinating putting this episode out all week is to make the blog as transparent as possible, while editing the podcast itself in a way that maintains at least some sense of quality and professionalism. Maybe in the future I'll re-record some bits, so as not to kill off my little but loyal audience, but I won't pretend on the blog that everything always goes to plan.

So what have I learnt from the podcast this week? I've learnt that a week goes by ridiculously quickly, and that as soon as you have anything else going on that isn't to do with the podcast, it suddenly becomes very difficult to get everything done on time. Even this blog post is a bit naff but frankly, it will have to do for this week. The point of the blog is for me to make sure that I'm reflecting on the project as I carry it out, and that my audience gets a more personal insight into the process of doing so. I hope that at the very least, it's fulfilled those two purposes.

None of this is to say that I didn't enjoy having Amal on the show or that the quality of the episode was her responsibility at all - in fact, overall, I do still think that the episode is really good because her responses were so thoughtful and so interesting (though it therefore only infuriates me more that I didn't maximise the potential of this interview) so it's definitely still worth a listen. Maybe one day I'll have her back on - when I'm a bit more educated, a bit more confident, a bit healthier overall, a bit less overwhelmed with the world. But for now, I think the other box will have to be a fortnightly podcast.