Conducting interviews to bring realism to your fiction

You’ll find my story “Duck and Cover” in this week’s Binyan. While I lived through the tail-end of the Cold War, I’m not old enough to have survived the Cuban Missile Crisis, the setting for my story. In order to get details about how teens reacted to the situation, I conducted brief email interviews of a number of subjects who were old enough to remember the events.

The responses I received were fascinating, and I used many of the anecdotes my interviewees shared as I depicted how different c...