The biggest challenge I have found in writing a profile is not so much finding a character as finding a “so what.” I’m in journalism because I think people everywhere are very interesting; most people, given enough poking and prodding, will yield sufficiently compelling life stories or internal contradictions that you would be able to regurgitate in, say, a dinner party setting. Follow someone around for a little bit and sprinkle richly written details about their life — how they drink their coffee, how they do their nails, how they move about in the world — and you appear to have a character.
How do you convince a reader that this person deserves a story of their own? You could try to connect their story to a broader narrative, as Deb and Hessler do. But this also has limitations, especially where the market of stories is saturated. I could, for example, go profile a tech CEO and describe breathlessly how they wake up really early in the morning, are always on their phone, and terrorize/encourage/manage their dedicated employees in a messy startup house in San Francisco. This could be interesting writing, but “Tech CEO works hard and wants to build a crazy product” is not a novel thing. Sometimes, a new angle just isn’t there.
I also think one thing that the Ragan and Nieman guides missed is the importance of interviews with people that are not the subject of the profile. They can provide important color and balance against whatever picture of themselves the subject is trying to paint to you. I recently reread Patrick Radden Keefe’s fantastic profile of the art dealer Larry Gagosian, which rests heavily on interviews with other movers and shakers in the art world about Gagosian’s career. While Radden Keefe does get significant interview time with his subject, which is revealing in its own right, his most interesting insights come from other people who have observed Gagosian for years. I suppose whether or not you’re able to do this depends on your subject. Deb’s nightclub girls and Hessler’s trash people are not people of renown, and their own authorial observations provide more than enough framing and commentary to draw out the story for the reader.
But I think one thing that’s easy to slip into in a profile — you see a lot of this in sports writing — is excessive deference to the subject. This happens for totally understandable reasons. You might feel a certain amount of gratitude to a subject that takes time to talk to you and invites you into your home, especially if they’re not a person of means. You are definitionally invested in hearing their story in full detail. But some of the best profiles are adversarial — perhaps so much so that the writer can’t get an interview with the subject. I think of NYMag’s profile of John Fetterman in May, which laid out the senator’s mental health struggles in devastating detail, or The Atlantic’s study in April of Trump 2.0. Both subjects did not give a fully honest retelling of their story.
