Recorded interviews and transcripts are interesting to researchers. But let’s face it, transcripts are too long and rambling for most readers. The conversation usually drifts back and forth from topic to topic and repeats itself.
But your group can create absorbing articles, short stories or books from the raw material of the transcripts.
How Do We Start the Writing Process?1
Start by analyzing the interview.
Here are some ways to do that:
- Organize the interview in order of time. When you do an interview, the
storytelling often jumps back and forth in time. You ask the storyteller to
clarify something that she spoke about earlier. Or she remembers a point
about the early years that she forgot to tell you in the last interview. Read the
transcript or listen to the interview and put all the events in a sequence from
the earliest to the most recent.
- Look for themes. What are the issues, events and meanings that run through
he interviews?2
- Look at patterns, key phrases and speech patterns. Look not only at what is
said, but how it is said.2
- Together the group might brainstorm some questions that help guide your
analysis:2
- What are the most important points in the interview?
- What do these stories tell us about history?
- How do the different interviews compare to each other?
- Listen to the interviews looking for categories: life events and stories, how to
do a skill, child rearing, hunting stories, beliefs, family relationships, etc. Label
different parts of the interview according to the categories.
- Make a list of ‘memorable phrases’ spoken by the storyteller in the interview.
You might use these words of wisdom to inspire you in your writing. You
could type them up in a large font and create posters for your work area. Later
you can use these memorable phrases in your writing as titles, subtitles or
captions under photographs.2