Writing
How to turn recorded interviews into a readable book
· 7 min read
Turn transcripts into a book in three passes: cut the interviewer out and reshape answers into continuous first person, tidy speech to the minimum needed for readability, then group passages into chapters by subject rather than by the order they were recorded. Expect to lose 30 to 50 percent of a raw transcript, almost all of it repetition, false starts and conversational scaffolding that nobody misses on the page.
Pass one: remove yourself
A transcript reads as a conversation. A book reads as one person talking. The first pass deletes your questions and rebuilds the answers so they stand alone, which usually means folding the question into the opening sentence.
Where a transcript reads "Q: What did you do after school? A: Well, we'd go down the rec," the page reads "After school we would go down the rec." Nothing has been added, but the reader no longer needs you in the room.
Pass two: tidy, but not too much
Raw speech on the page is unreadable: everyone repeats themselves, doubles back and uses filler. But over-editing produces a stranger, and families notice immediately when a book no longer sounds like the person.
- Cut: filler words, repeated sentences, false starts, and asides about the recording itself.
- Keep: unusual word choices, dialect, and any phrase the family would recognise as theirs.
- Keep: sentence rhythm, even where it is not strictly grammatical. This is where voice lives.
- Fix: tangled sentences that cannot be followed on the page, and pronouns with no clear referent.
- Never: replace their vocabulary with better vocabulary. If they said "terror", do not write "formidable".
Pass three: group by subject, not by session
People do not answer in a tidy order. One session may touch childhood, a job in the seventies and a death, and the book should not preserve that sequence.
Cut the transcript into passages, label each by subject, then gather them into chapters. Material recorded eight months apart frequently belongs on the same page, and only becomes visible once you stop treating each session as a unit.
How to open a chapter
The strongest chapter openings are usually a specific scene rather than a summary, and they are almost never the first thing the person said on the subject.
Read the whole chapter's material and look for the concrete moment: a room, an object, a piece of dialogue. Put it first. The context can follow, and the reader will stay for it.
What to do with contradictions
People contradict themselves across months of recording, particularly on dates and sequence. You have three options and only one of them is bad.
You can pick the more likely version, you can include both and say the accounts differ, or you can leave a small uncertainty in the text. What does not work is silently averaging them into a version that nobody said, which reads as flat and is not true to any account.
Common questions
- How much of a transcript makes it into the book?
- Typically 50 to 70 percent. The rest is repetition, false starts, filler and conversational scaffolding, almost none of which is missed on the page.
- Should I correct my relative's grammar?
- Only where a sentence cannot be followed. Dialect, unusual word choice and sentence rhythm are where voice lives, and families notice immediately when a book stops sounding like the person.
- How do I organise chapters from recordings?
- By subject, not by recording session. Cut the transcript into passages, label each by topic, then group them. Material recorded months apart often belongs on the same page.