"Do your homework"
excerpt from Full of Love

I'll be the first to admit it – I like to be über-prepared when I step out onto the red carpet. I mean, I want to know everybody who's nominated, everybody who's presenting and friggin' everything that's been written about them in the press! And if I'm lucky, my research will turn up the one tidbit of information that prompts the right question that makes for a super interview.

That's exactly what happened when I was reading up on Johnny Depp. I saw that he'd credited his daughter, Lily-Rose Melody, for the amazing voice he gave his Willy Wonka character in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I was so intrigued, but that was all I could find out. I was hosting NBC's live red carpet arrival show for the 2005 Golden Globes, where he was nominated for Best Actor, and I hoped I'd have the chance to get the whole story.

Well I got my wish. He told me he'd come up with a number of different voices for Willy Wonka but couldn't decide which one worked. Then he tried them all out on his daughter to get her reaction. She became his personal laugh-o-meter! The voice that made her laugh the hardest? That's the one he gave Willy Wonka.

That one tiny detail ended up making our interview so special, and it's the same when I sit down to journal. I'm not saying you need to turn telling your story into a homework assignment, but here's a little tip that works for me when I'm looking for those make-it-or-break-it details:

When I want to write about a photo and there are things I just can't remember about it – maybe it's really old or I've just forgotten – I'll e-mail it to my dad or my sister or my friends and ask them what they remember about it.

In fact, even when you do remember the details yourself, asking different friends and family members to share their recollections about a photo can really jump-start your journaling. (Asking kids what's going on in a photo – whether they really know or not – can get some totally entertaining results.) It's like the telephone game you played as a kid – nobody will tell you exactly the same thing. Suddenly your single-focus perspective on that person or that event gets replaced by a 360-degree view and you're finding out all kinds of new things.

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