How Long Should One Storytelling Sitting Be? One Question, Ten Minutes, or Until They Stop

You've found a quiet hour, your phone is recording, and your grandmother is sitting across from you. The question is: how long do you stay?

The honest answer is shorter than you think. One question, handled well, is a complete sitting. Ten to twenty minutes is plenty for most. Stop before she's tired, never mid-story - and come back next week.

The fastest way into a good oral history interview

Ask one specific question about a moment they've lived - not a theme, a moment. "What was the first apartment you ever paid rent on?" lands better than "Tell me about your early life." A specific door opens more than a wide hallway. Let them answer until they stop naturally, then ask one follow-up. Then stop recording. That is a sitting.

Step 1: Choose your one question before you arrive

The single biggest reason storytelling sittings run too long or go flat is that the interviewer improvises every question. Write one down the night before. Some that open well:

• "What did your mother cook that you've never been able to replicate?"

• "What was the first job you were ever paid for?"

• "Where were you when you heard the news about [a specific world event they lived through]?"

• "What did the house you grew up in smell like?"

• "Who taught you how to drive, and how did that go?"

Notice that none of these ask for a summary of a life. They ask for a sensory detail or a contained event. Those questions produce stories. Summaries produce lists.

Time: choosing one question takes about two minutes the night before. It saves ten minutes of fumbling during the sitting itself.

Step 2: Watch for signs they're tiring

Most people don't say "I'm tired." They trail off, repeat themselves, look toward the window, or start answering shorter. Some pick up an object nearby - a mug, a pillow - and hold it. Any of these is the signal. It doesn't mean the sitting failed. It means you timed it right.

For someone living with memory loss or significant fatigue, the sitting may be one question with no follow-up - and that is the whole thing. Questions about the distant past (childhood, early work, a first memory of a spouse) tend to stay accessible longer than questions about recent events. One vivid answer from the 1960s is worth more than a halting twenty minutes about last year.

Time: most people give their best material in the first eight to twelve minutes. After fifteen, the law of diminishing returns applies to almost everyone.

Step 3: End the sitting, not the story

If they're mid-story when you notice they're fading, don't wait for a natural pause that may not come. The most useful sentence in oral history work is: "I want to hear the rest of this - can we pick up right here next time?" Then stop recording.

This does several things at once. It tells them their story matters enough to continue. It gives them something to look forward to. And it means next week's sitting already has its opening question: "Last time you were telling me about..."

Never end by saying "I think we're done for today." End by naming what comes next.

Time: a graceful close takes about ninety seconds. The recording stops clean.

Step 4: Back up the recording the same day

The sitting is only preserved if the file is in two places. The day you record, copy it to a second location - a laptop, a cloud folder, an external drive, wherever you already keep things you don't want to lose. Label it clearly: the person's name, the date, and one or two words about the topic. Something like Ruth_2024-09-14_first-apartment will be searchable in ten years. Voice memo 47 will not.

If you're using Glow, Talk with Glow lets you run a sitting as one question, three questions, or a set time - ten minutes or until they stop - and it checks the clock only between answers, so nobody gets cut off in the middle of a sentence. Each sitting saves as its own thread you can return to.

Time: backing up and labelling one recording takes about three minutes.

Step 5: Build a rhythm, not a marathon

A life story doesn't need to be collected in one afternoon. A loose weekly rhythm - one sitting, one question or two, every seven to ten days - gives the person time to think between sessions, and gives you time to listen to what you recorded and find the follow-up thread. Over a few months, that rhythm produces something substantial without exhausting anyone.

Some weeks a sitting won't happen. That's fine. Come back the following week with last time's unfinished story. The project doesn't reset; it just pauses.

Time: a weekly ten-minute sitting is about as much calendar commitment as a phone call you were going to make anyway.

If they say "I don't have anything interesting to tell"

This happens in almost every family, and it usually means they're picturing a biography, not a conversation. Your job is to lower the stakes. Say: "I'm not asking you to tell me your whole life. I just want to know what that first apartment actually looked like." A specific, small question makes the task feel possible. Nobody feels they have nothing to say about what their kitchen smelled like in 1974.

If they're much farther along in cognitive decline

One question may genuinely be the sitting. Ask it, let them answer in whatever form that takes, and stop there. The goal shifts from collecting a full narrative to capturing presence - the texture of how they talk, the words they still reach for, a laugh. That is worth recording too. There is no minimum story length for something to matter. If you want those spoken memories shaped into something written and lasting, Glow's Biographer and Historian can turn a recorded conversation into a written chapter the whole family can read.

Where to keep it once it's saved

A folder on a laptop is a start, but a folder no one else can find isn't an archive - it's just storage. The recordings are most useful when they live somewhere other family members can hear them: a shared folder with a cousin who also remembers the stories, a space where someone can add the photograph from that first apartment to sit next to the audio of her describing it. That's the difference between preserving something and passing it on. If you're also gathering old photos alongside those recordings, it's worth thinking early about how to choose which photos belong with which stories before the collection grows unwieldy. Start with one sitting backed up and labelled. Then decide where it belongs long-term - because the recording that took ten minutes to make can outlast everyone in the room.