Self-Confidence in Interviews

When I was in high school, I applied to be various different Sterling scholars: Foreign Language, English, General. When I was scheduled for the Foreign Language interview, I turned out to have a very high fever. But I decided to go in anyway, because I wanted to show I was tough. Bad plan. Very bad plan. This began a string of terrible interview situations.

The French teacher asked me several questions in French. Perhaps because I had learned my French in Germany and he was American, I could not understand him. I kept asking him to repeat himself, and eventually gave up completely. The the German teacher talked to me for a bit, ending on this lovely gem, "Why do you want to be a Sterling scholar?"

To me, this seemed the stupidest question I had ever heard. Yet people were asking high school students this all the time, as if we had some brilliant, humble answer. I wanted to be a Sterling scholar because it was an honor that all the adults around me said I should go for, and basically, because it would look good on my applications for college. Which was my end goal in life at the time: getting into a good college with a scholarship.

In my feverish, deluded state, I said something like (in very bad German), because it would be a great ego trip.

Yeah, not great interviewing skills.

Fast forward a couple of years and I was doing an exit interview from my B.A. program where I had to do an oral interview completely in German with a native speaker. I was doing OK until I flubbed a little on the broken pipes question. My German did not tend toward the practical, since I spent most of my time reading 18th century texts.

The really bad part came when the professor asked me what I would do if my sixteen year-old daughter announced she was going to get married. I was nineteen at the time and remembered quite keenly how it felt to be sixteen. At nineteen, people still treated me as a teenager (which I was) and constantly told me that I would agree with them when I was older (mostly, I don't, but it's really just a way to stop an argument).

So I argued that I wouldn't stop my teenager from marrying, that she was probably perfectly capable of making a mature, adult choice. The professor was appalled. I'm pretty sure the argument shortly became a test of my sanity rather than my German. He did give me a decent grade (A-), but he was ANGRY. So was I.

Since then, I have always been  nervous in interview situations or anything public. When I became an author, I was terrified of doing school visits or even book signings. I wanted people to tell me EVERYTHING I was supposed to do, what I should wear, what I should say, how long I should say it for, where I should look, what expression I should go for, and on and on.

Then this weekend at Bouchercon, I had a panel called "Small Towns." I did a bit of reading up on the other panelists and the moderator to acquaint myself with their work. And that's it. I wasn't even remotely nervous about the panel. A couple of questions surprised me, but didn't faze me. Afterward, my publisher and editor seemed very happy and complimented me on how well I had been able to both answer the question and bring up "talking points" about The Bishop's Wife.

I hadn't once thought of any of it. I was just having a good time, enjoying myself as if at a friend's dinner party. It was only that night when I was back in my hotel room, not at all nervous about meeting new people and saying the right things, that I realized how far I had come. I thought about another author I met who seemed tongue-tied and thought how I was exactly like that about ten years ago. It didn't mean anything about intelligence, only about ease.

I don't know where it came from, but thank God it came at last.