Channel your inner reporter: using interviews to strengthen your fiction

I'm a big advocate of talking to real people as part of your routine research for novel writing. Internet research and books can be a good starting place, but these sources can't provide the rich details you need to make certain careers or time periods or phenomenon come alive on the page. You need to tap into eyewitness sources and draw on the experiences and expertise of real people who are intimately familiar with these things.
By George Armstrong, FEMA Library, via Wikimedia Commons
I talk...