Just the Facts, Ma’am
The first time an editor asked me to turn in my notes, I was terrified. Did this mean that they didn’t trust me? That my story sucked and that they were going to re-write it based on the notes I had? What if they saw that I included a detail that I remembered from my interview but failed to write down? Would they call me a liar? Were they going to yell at me for all those little weird two-sentence notes that I couldn’t remember the meaning of?” (“Red. Weird.” “Angry. September.”) Worst of all, my notes were conducted in chicken scratch handwriting, even less decipherable than my usual bad handwriting.
Relax, though. With the a priori that you are an honest reporter, your notes are not going to get you in trouble.
Notes are simply backup, says Melissa Walker, senior editor at ElleGirl. “It’s so that the research department can confirm that you didn’t take a quote out of context or change it, and also to double-check any facts, stats, names, ages, etc. It’s totally standard at major magazines, and the best format is a very neatly typed transcript of interviews, often with the parts you used in the text highlighted. Sometimes, though, yes, an editor will pull an extra quote to use from your transcript.”
So for all you procrastinators out there, if you know ahead of time that your notes are going to be needed, build in the time to type up your notes or your tapes. It’s a drag but it’s not as bad as you think. (You can find some handy-dandy transcription tips here.)
“Writers shouldn’t freak out–it’s all standard,” reassures Walker.
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