Q:I'm breaking into freelancing and am pitching a piece that involves doing my first phone interview. I'm painfully shy and hate the phone in addition to being inexperienced. I'm also concerned with notetaking, as I don't have much practice and I don't have any recording gear. Any advice?

A: Congratulations! I hate phone interviewing too but you have to start sometime. My advice is to write down your questions ahead of time, taking care to write any follow-up and backups that you can think of because you might be too nervous to come up with these on the spot. Practice asking these questions out loud.

While you definitely want to be friendly and conversational, don't worry about mindless chitchat: the interviewee knows he's being interviewed so you can get down to business without too much ado.

I think you'll find notetaking easier than you think. It will naturally to you which is most important to write down and which little filler words you can omit. Your source isn't going to look at the piece and say, "Hey, I said 'which,' not 'that.'" Plus you can always ask them to slow down or repeat. And practice, if you like. Call up your wife or dad or best friend and practice asking them questions and writing down their responses. If you prefer to type your notes as you write, that's fine too but close down all your programs but your word processing ones because you could miss something while you're glancing at CNN.com.

If anybody else has any feedback for our shy first-timer, please let me know. Good luck!