Notes on Craft: How To Write A Profile
Writing a profile is one of the bedrocks of literary work. Ever so often, we must consider the figures and influence of certain people, and knowing how to do so has never been this important.
As a human being, it is assumed that you know one or two things about other humans. We have been meeting people every day of our lives, and consciously and subconsciously, we’re able to create narratives about others, informed by the things they say or do. The art (and act) of writing a profile isn’t so different from those exercises in perception. Except, this time, the storytelling engages a higher level of literary attributes, such as the arrangement of one’s materials. Because we must tell the stories of those doing excellently across society, profiles have always been a hallmark in African tradition and storytelling. We revere our great ancestors and honor our well-do-to contemporaries, and through the exaltation of the word—then it was spoken; now it is being written—are we able to do that.
I spoke earlier of the arrangement of one’s materials. If profiles are intended to celebrate some striking, enduring quality in a person, then it is presumed that the person has attracted some prior attention. As with beautiful things, exceptional people are often visible to most eyes, but the depth of seeing would always vary. To achieve proper depth in a profile, one must collect previous information on that person. This allows for a broad perspective on the work and ideas of the subject, opening up possible angles for your profile. An academic behavior I like is the insistence on filling knowledge gaps; a thesis looks at previous discussions in the field and finds the work that’s still left to be done. The new work doesn’t come across as a summary of all the old ones.
Learning of the past is just one door in a house full of them. Another material to be understood is the philosophy of the subject. This isn’t about arrangement as it is about empathy. We all have philosophies and they vary, but in itself, every philosophy is worthy of being put into considerate prose. Fiction has its lessons; from Nabokov to Garcia Marquez, great writers have created worrisome characters, but it is the mark of transcendental literature to render the narratives as believably as possible. So does your profile subject have a philosophy—I work now primarily in entertainment, but the burden of empathy tells me I’ll create wider portraits of people in the future, across varying mediums, and an important task for me would surely be the deliberate telling of what they think of the world and their place in it, the values they hold themselves to, their pleasures and ambitions, their nagging sorrows.
In the fast, hyper-commercialized world of today, intimacy can sometimes be frowned at. Nobody wants to unravel themselves and even more wouldn’t risk the trouble of trying to. But for the sake of storytelling, opening up oneself is a necessity as well as being a skill. Profiles demand conversation. It’s not to be considered an interview, since its formalistic tendency tends to close up subjects. Poking holes, finding the clickbait quote—fewer people are talking because they don’t want to feel judged, but people want to tell stories. Every person is a walking story and stories require telling in order to breathe within the person. So to get a subject to tell theirs, the handler of a profile must first tell theirs. This happens on different levels.
On one hand, the telling could happen during the interview itself. Before we begin talking, what I do personally is tell the subject why I find their work interesting, and my personal connections to it, if there’s any. It’s not flattery; it’s setting up their psyche to the set of questions you intend to ask. Another way the telling of the writer’s story happens is within the piece itself. You might not start with your own perspective, but somewhere along the telling of the other person’s story, your mind finds a place of alignment. You align with that aspect of their work or their philosophy, and there’s value in making that known, not as cheesy praise but as a means of revealing the universal quality of that thing that’s being highlighted, and so the writer must place themselves in the perspective of a global audience.
A most important book in my journalistic career has been the interview anthology with New New Journalist writers such as Gay Talese, Ted Conover, Susan Orlean, Lawrence Wright, Jane Kramer and many others. The interviews were conducted by Robert S. Boynton who did a fantastic job of getting the seasoned authors to discuss their process. A young writer reached out to me recently asking for help on how to craft better interview questions. For me, the skill lies in being a good observer, as well as thinking along a conceptual framework. The authors in the anthology have all made an art of both qualities; the first is especially important in fieldwork, where the writer must watch and listen, but also talk when needed, so as not to seem overly out of place. A conceptual framework means that during the asking of the questions, if there’s a plan to turn it into words, then you must consider the blocks of the house you’re going to build. You don’t want to source materials for a storey-building only to discover it could only work for a small bungalow. Aim for complexity but execute simply. More than anything, think on the spot. We use different languages to communicate with different people; so should the subject of a profile be treated—as a unique story requiring a unique telling.
Now the interview is over. You have the material you need, or most of it anyways. That’s okay. Perfection is an illusion. It’s time to arrange the material into a cohesive profile. A lot of people listen to their interviews and have them transcribed. I’m quite unusual in that sense; I listen to them but I don’t transcribe them. I’ve only had a few interviews transcribed and that was because of their length and variety of topics. At this point I assume you’ve mapped out the different angles of the subject you want to cover and have asked questions based on those angles. For example, when I profiled the visual artist Anthony Azekwoh in 2021, I knew I wanted to relay a 360 vision of his artistry; he started as a writer, published some books online, then went into drawing, and then into digital painting. At the time we spoke he was transitioning into other mediums, and some months later had started 3D sculpting.
The angles you should ideally cover depends on the space or publication you’re sharing it. An artist like Burna Boy who has many facets to them would be approached differently considering the different spaces. While GQ might propel his outsized philosophy that he “[has] to think for a whole generation,” the critical gaze of The Continent informs them to peruse the musician’s “self-destruction,” especially on the back of his numerous shortcomings in character and ideological depth; “Half as tall,” the first part of the headline read. This tells the writer that by virtue of its illuminating characteristics, writing is, and has always been, political. Sometimes the publication matters as much as the piece, considering that vision differs. Which isn’t to say that GQ pieces are inherently lacking in critical heft; rather, in this particular case, the musician’s philosophy is considered to be enough. And it is enough. But the profiles that transcend time and mediums are profiles with heart and tact, which gives the subject their voice while questioning the merits of their opinion. This tussle with philosophy often leads the writer to discover something new within the body of the work under consideration. About angles: it goes without saying that a magazine about weed would want to discuss the usage of marijuana in the artist’s life, while digging, if it can, into wider strains of the conversation; like how art has long been the closest allies of the marijuana counterculture.
Writing a profile requires music. The music of sounds which become words which become stories. At its core, words are sounds, and so one’s sentences must attempt to capture the unique sound of the subject. Profiling an artist like Fela Kuti, the words and cadences used tend to have a scorching quality; incendiary, urgent, constricted. It’s a mirroring of the artist’s sound. So would a profile on Asa flow like the calm evening breeze, the sounds evoking the serenity of watching sea waves curl. Poetry helps sharpen this ear for music; Shakespeare, Pablo Neruda, Tomas Transtromer, and Robert Frost are just a few poets with immense originality; there’s thousands of others, their words eternal, craving to illuminate our stories.
In the New New journalism school of thought, which most magazines adopt nowadays, profiles (and creative nonfiction in general) should imbibe the narrative and descriptive quality of fiction. This means an essential grasp of the storytelling form, which is the beginning, the middle, and the end. And so profiles tend to begin with the spark of an idea; where the subject began from with that current work, or where their careers stretch back to. The depth of returning depends on the overarching angle the writer seeks to take. In African culture journalism, few people—personally I would say no one—writes better profiles than Otosirieze Obi-Young, the founder and editor of Open Country Magazine, where I worked since early 2020 before leaving this year. His profiles of Teju Cole and Rita Dominic are especially masterful; in the former, he began with a visceral evocation of an event where Cole announced his pedigree as a thinker and speaker of the highest order, predating the interests he would explore in his later work. Drawing the essayist’s wide range of interests into the picture, his ethos emerges, but quite unassumingly, only visible to the attentive eye. Dominic’s long, excellent career in Nollywood is also depicted brilliantly by Otosirieze, who enters into the psychology and technique that goes behind her many memorable characters.
Quotes and movements are also important parts of the profile. For the most part, the writer is narrating events but when it comes to what readers will take away the most, it’s the quotes of the subject. This is because it’s a direct address to the reader, knocking down the narrative barrier between the writer and them. A good way to collect quotes is to listen to their sound. Some quotes don’t read eruditely (indeed, not everyone speaks in high language) but the colloquialism or the tone of the speech makes it a fit. And as a rule, keep narrations out of quotes when writing a profile. If an artist narrates how he used to walk ten miles to fetch water, tell that in your own words (chances are you will do it better than them) but when he speaks about the influence of that walk on his mentality, then capture that in quotes. It cuts away fluff and leaves the truly important material.
Movements—and this is something Otosirieze taught me—simply means the meandering of the writer through the various facets they have to explore. Cutting through the storytelling, presenting this massive pile of information into readable, connecting plots. The man had me read several profiles from the New Yorker (the most memorable were those of Saidiya Hartman and Aretha Franklin), the New York Times, and several other magazines, but mostly those two. Here he broke down those profiles into movements, showing me how to track the progression of a piece. When I did so, I found out that, put together, such pieces had the quality of good novels, in that Movement 2 would always have its clues in Movement 1. Minor characters in the first movement would turn out to be major characters in the second, and when that happens, there’s a fulfillment in the reader’s mind, because there’s no sudden jumps in the storytelling.
In contemporary Nigerian society, Profiling is quite a bad word. Applied in a social context to mean law enforcement agencies picking on people who look some kind of way, it’s however one of the foundations of writing. It goes beyond journalism and into the kind of writing Emmanuel Iduma does, as seen in his nonfiction books A Stranger’s Pose and I Am Still With You. He’s influenced by contemporaries like Cole, but also twentieth century writers like V.S Naipaul, Graham Greene, W.G Sebald, John Berger, and Joan Didion—all of them being writers who intensely coveted the colorful material of everyday lives, and through that interest, met with people whose stories revealed something of the era’s sensibilities.
And you’re in luck—we haven’t had many great profiles in our literature. Our stories and books crave the purposeful indulgence of the sheer luminosity that is the human body and mind, the cacophonous warmth of all that makes us live and become. Profiles can be a way of celebrating the worthwhile qualities and achievements of a person, but more than that, it’s a catalog of actions, emotions, and realizations, which are qualities found in the stories of everyone. I hope this essay inspires us to write better and more complex stories about people.