A central component of the hostwriting process is that I ask questions, and you answer them. Your answer becomes a minimum viable product, a small intermediate packet, that you can reuse for your writing projects at a later point in time. Since you're planning to re-use some of the material, it's important to be package these questions and answers in a way that make them easy to reuse later. There's a few components of that, and I try to take care of most of the hard work for you. But you'll need to do some work, too.
To provide some context. What makes the hostwriting process different from an interview? It's very similar. I ask questions, you answer, boom, we're done. There are a few differences, but one big difference is that our goal is to turn an interview into a stand-alone product written by one author: you. To succeed at doing this, you'll need to build a critical skill that will help you re-use your answers later. Before I tell you what that skill is, take a look at this excerpt from my Mind Body Attention interview with Soryu Forall:
Feedback loops are central to your teaching. What are they, and how do they relate to contemplative practice and spirituality?
In my way of using the term, I'm referring to an aspect of a subtle and multifaceted term in Classical Buddhism, which in Sanskrit is sanskara. This is one of the most important terms, in my view, in Classical Buddhism.
Now read that again, but read just the answer this time. What do you notice? If this wasn't an interview, and you hadn't already read the question, it wouldn't make sense! What's “the term” that's being referred to? How would the reader know that the English phrase “feedback loop” is being connected to the traditional term sanskara?
Answer: they wouldn't.
Of course, there isn't a problem with my interview, because the final product I wanted is an interview, so I can leave the questions in. But your final product isn't an interview - it's a blog post, an essay, a book, or something else entirely.
The skill you'll need to build in order to re-use your answers is restating the question. Your goal is to be able to answer every question that I ask you so that your readers could read your answer without reading my question and still understand what you meant. If you just jump in and answer the question, eight times out of ten, your answer alone wouldn't have enough context for a reader to understand your answer without my question still in there. Trust me, I'll ask a great question, and you'll give a great answer - we just want to tweak the way you answer my questions so that it makes it easier for you and your reader later on.
For example, if you were a socialist blogger, I might ask you a top-level question to establish shared understanding: “What is socialism?” You could re-phrase this question successfully in at least two ways:
To start, you'll probably want to start by literally re-phrasing the question. But later, you can get more and more playful in how you do this. I think of the liberal re-phrasing as if you were giving a presentation, such as a TED Talk. You wouldn't want to start a TED Talk by saying “Socialism is…” - you'd want to give an engaging, interesting hook that would clue the listener in - they are about to find out what socialism is. This is a skill, though, so it will take time to build and develop. And don't worry, like any skill, it will become automatic.
Here's a way to begin practicing this skill. (Remember, this is a kind of meta-assignment to prepare for our future work together.) To begin, copy Soryu's answer and re-write it so it literally includes the question or a version of it. You should be able to read your version of Soryu's answer without the context of the question, and have it still make sense.
What's next?