What to ask when you sit down to record someone's life story

StoryCorps has recorded conversations between ordinary people since 2003, and it publishes the questions it uses. The list is free, it is long, and its own framing is modest: “With over two decades of listening, we know what makes a good conversation: Start by asking Great Questions.”

If you are planning to sit down with someone and record them, that list is a better starting point than anything you will improvise at the kitchen table. What follows is which parts of it earn their place, and what we would skip — the second half being our editorial judgment, not StoryCorps’ recommendation.

The list does not want to be followed

StoryCorps says so directly: “We encourage you to use the ones you like and to come up with your own,” and “This list is in no particular order.”

That is worth taking literally, because the instinct on the day is to work down the page. A recorded conversation that marches through forty questions produces forty short answers. Six questions and a willingness to sit through the pauses produces something a person will listen to twice.

Print the list. Circle eight. Leave the rest as a safety net for when the room goes quiet.

The questions that ask for a scene beat the ones that ask for a summary

This is the pattern we would point at first, and it is an observation rather than a finding — read it as one editor’s view of the list.

Compare two questions from the same page. “What are the most important lessons you’ve learned in life?” asks someone to summarize eighty years into a paragraph, and most people answer it with something they have said before: work hard, family matters, be kind. It is true and it sounds like a greeting card.

Now: “Are there any funny stories your family tells about you that come to mind?” Nobody has a prepared answer to that. They have to go find one, and what comes back has a kitchen in it, and a brother, and a year.

The scene-shaped questions on the list are the ones we would circle. “What is your earliest memory?” “When were you drafted or when did you enlist?” “Do you remember any of the stories your grandparents used to tell you?” Each one sends a person to a specific room rather than to a conclusion.

The summary questions are not useless. They just work better late, once someone has been talking for half an hour and has stopped performing.

The questions people skip are the ones that produce the most

StoryCorps’ list includes a set that most people leave out because they feel too direct to ask a parent:

• “What is your favorite memory of me?”
• “What were your first impressions of me?”
• “Are there things about me that you’ve always wanted to know but have never asked?”

These feel self-centered to ask and they are not. They are the questions whose answers exist nowhere else — nobody else can tell you what your mother thought when she first saw you. A biography of someone’s childhood can be reconstructed from cousins and photographs. That cannot.

They also change the register of the recording. A person answering questions about the war is a narrator. A person answering “what were your first impressions of me” is talking to you, and the recording stops being an interview.

If you ask only one thing from this entire list, we would make it one of those three.

The hard ones, and permission not to ask them

The list does not flinch. “When in life have you felt most alone?” “Do you have any regrets?” “If this was to be our very last conversation, is there anything you’d want to say to me?”

Some people have been waiting decades for someone to ask. Others will find the same question intrusive, or frightening, or simply not want to spend an afternoon there — and a question asked out of completeness rather than genuine interest lands as an interrogation.

Our view: bring them written down, and ask them only if the conversation has already gone somewhere near. If it hasn’t, the recording is not a failure. A funny story about a dog is worth keeping.

The one question on the list worth asking even when the room is light is the last-conversation one, and even then only if you can hear the answer without flinching. It is not a small thing to ask someone to say goodbye on tape.

Six questions is plenty

The arithmetic surprises people. A person who is enjoying themselves will talk for eight or ten minutes on a single good question. Six of those fills an hour, which is longer than most families have ever recorded of anyone.

So the plan for the day is short: six circled questions, one recorder, and the discipline to stay quiet after each answer for a beat longer than feels comfortable. The best material almost always arrives in the sentence someone adds after they have finished — the one they start with “although,” or “the thing nobody knows is.”

If they tire, stop. Two half-hours on two afternoons is better than ninety minutes of someone being polite.

Where this list sits among the others

StoryCorps’ questions are for the kitchen table. They assume a person with the energy for a conversation and an afternoon to give it.

There is a more structured set used in hospice care, built for a person who may have very little energy left, and it works differently — the dignity therapy questions are shorter, gentler, and designed to be answered in one sitting. If the person you are thinking of is very ill, start there instead.

And if they served in the military, the conversation you are about to have may belong somewhere permanent: the Library of Congress has been collecting veterans’ firsthand accounts since 2000, and a single thirty-minute interview meets its bar. StoryCorps’ list has a military section — “When were you drafted or when did you enlist?” is on it — so one afternoon can serve both.

For the practical side of the recording itself — the room, the microphone, what to do with the file afterward — there’s a walkthrough here.

The questions are free and they are better than yours

That is the whole argument for using them. Twenty-plus years of recorded conversations went into working out which openings get an answer and which get a shrug, and the result costs nothing and takes five minutes to read.

StoryCorps’ own closing question is the one that gives a recording its reason to exist: “For generations listening to this years from now, is there any wisdom you’d want to pass on to them? What would you want them to know?”

Somebody has to ask it out loud, or the answer stays where it is.