Making the best use of interviews

I love my recorder very very much. I use an Olympus WS-311 M digital voice recorder. It's nifty. It's a little bigger than a pack of gum. It takes a triple A battery, it plugs into the USB on my laptop, and it shows up on my desktop. The sounds is great, I couldn't recommend it more highly. Evidently it is also a music player if that is important to you.

Digital is particularly handy. I use quicktime to listen to recordings, and I file them away on my external hard drive when I am done with whatever it is I am working on. This is a huge advantage over tapes. I have to keep recordings of interviews for a certain amount of time for legal reasons but they're hard to file. They're clutter.

That said, I still loath going back to them.

Some things I have learned —
-Review your notes as soon as you have the chance to debrief.
- When you're writing go back to your notes before you go back to the recording.
- While I take notes longhand during the actual interview, taking notes by hand from the recording just takes work. Instead by using "apple-tab" I can switch between apps, from quicktime to word and back to pause and play the recording while I transcribe relevant passages.
- Despite my best efforts it is impossible to transcribe an interview with music on, even brain food music.
- When transcribing, make sure you capture what they were trying to say not just what came out. People don't always say what they mean to say, they pause at inopportune moments and they start saying one thing but change their mind and finish saying something else.

I am currently exploring the possibility of learning short hand — It doesn't look promising for the short term though.

Mixed blessings

The list thing worked.

When I ran out of steam, instead of making tea and watching 30 rock on Sidereel I checked the list and did whatever matched my level of ambition at that moment. I got almost everything done.
In fact all I have left is to listen/transcribe my interviews for these stories. Blurgh.

And of course I still have to write the stories.

Struggling for three days

"I didn't write 46 pages today, I wrote one page 46 times" Walter Mathau said it some movie where he was a writer.

I work in fits and starts, which is to say I will struggle —agonize — over a story for three or four days, only then I will sit down and write it. I do believe that I need that time for my understanding of a topic to come together. The thing is that at the end of those germinating days, I look at my "current projects" documents and feel like I wasted the day.

So the challenge for this week is to make those days where ideas are germinating look productive.

My friend Jeremy was in town this weekend. Over coffee we talked about our respective short-comings writing. He is an engineer and one of the most systematically productive people I know. On the other hand I work from my laptop wherever that might be, I get distracted, I procrastinate, I can't multi-task and tend to focus on the trees not the forest. I am not good at thinking about the next project if the current one is not done.

He is working on a fantasy series. Right now he is focusing on laying out his universe, characters and plotlines — and is not written anything yet. He's ok with that. Anyhow, this was a pretty radical idea for me.

He suggested I make lists, to prioritize, yes, but particularly so that I knew what to do with myself when I hit a wall, so that maybe at the end of those germinating days, I would have at least planted seeds for the next project.

So I spent the morning making lists. The whole morning — LISTS. At the moment it seems like a lot of time passed that has not gotten me any closer to finishing a story, but I will keep faith and see what kind of payoff I get when I reach end of the week staring down a Friday deadline for the mag and Tuesday deadlines for the paper.

Monday is my 730AM hockey game so its not like Mondays are very productive days anyhow.

The debrief

First a recap, last week I did sit down and write 300 words — not just any 300 words — 300 very good words. And then I got up and drank a glass of water, did a waltz around my living room and I sat down and wrote another 350 words. All done. In about an hour and a half. Six hundred words I had been struggling with for three days.

I did have very good interviews to work from on that story. I also took a lot of time over the previous two days to go back over my interviews, pull out the important quotes and figure out where I had to flesh the story out for myself. I loath going through my interviews. As useful as it is to hear the interview, I dread hearing my own voice on tape. I usually only go back to the interviews as an act of desperation. This is a good reminder that there is a payoff to doing it properly. The more I use quotes the fewer words I have to come up with myself.

So, the "just do it" approach worked this time.

Getting started and moving on.

I am notoriously bad at multitasking and exceedingly good at procrastinating. Here's the thing, like a lot of people out there I do want to be more productive. I am just not too sure how to go about it.

Given my years' experience procrastinating I am very knowledgeable at how not to get work done. That is where the question of folly and sacrilege comes in handy. I am looking to rid myself of habits that don't work — sacrilege — and explore and adopt wild and crazy ideas, or rather anything outside of my immediate confort zone that just might — folly. God has nothing to do with this. This has to do with making time for me to learn and create, so maybe in an animist sort of way God is interested. But that is not the point. Don't let Erasmus throw you off.

Rachel, my younger, cooler, and more connected sister, got me started reading Unclutter, and through their intrepid site I got hooked on lifehacker and 43 folders. This is just to say that I will freely borrow and refer to them, probably work my way through many of their suggestions.

There are two ground rules, one is low tech — I have a mac, not a hobby — and low up front investment, because I am afterall a freelance writer. I look forward to seeing if this makes me any more useful.

The first experiment — back to deadline hell. I have 600 words to go. Today I am only letting myself get up every 250 words. We'll see how that goes.

For Hallowe'en I am going to be productive.