The biggest challenge I have found in writing a profile is not so much finding a character as finding a \u201cso what.\u201d I\u2019m 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 \u2014 how they drink their coffee, how they do their nails, how they move about in the world \u2014 and you appear to have a character.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cTech CEO works hard and wants to build a crazy product\u201d is not a novel thing. Sometimes, a new angle just isn\u2019t there.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s fantastic profile<\/a> of the art dealer Larry Gagosian, which rests heavily on interviews with other movers and shakers in the art world about Gagosian\u2019s 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.\u00a0I suppose whether or not you\u2019re able to do this depends on your subject. Deb\u2019s nightclub girls and Hessler\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n But I think one thing that\u2019s easy to slip into in a profile \u2014 you see a lot of this in sports writing \u2014 is excessive deference to the subject. This happens for totally understandable reasons.\u00a0You 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\u2019re not a person of means. You are definitionally invested in hearing their story in full detail. But some of the best profiles are adversarial \u2014 perhaps so much so that the writer can\u2019t get an interview with the subject. I think of NYMag\u2019s profile<\/a> of John Fetterman in May, which laid out the senator\u2019s mental health struggles in devastating detail, or The Atlantic\u2019s study<\/a> in April of Trump 2.0. Both subjects did not give a fully honest retelling of their story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The biggest challenge I have found in writing a profile is not so much finding a character as finding a \u201cso what.\u201d I\u2019m 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<\/p>\n