Showing you both the process and product, Can I Quote You on That? takes you through all the interviewing steps from contacting interviewees to completing interviews for publication. Along the way, we'll look at how to ask for an interview, developing and ordering lists of questions, the importance of research and how to research without much notice, conducting an interview without any notice, time, how to politely persist and get an interview from people who say yes but won't set a date, why your spam folder may contain a golden ham, technical considerations and proper equipment, what I did when I lost all copies of an interview, handling the laconic and the loquacious, organization, assembling a collection of interviews, efficiently transcribing from audio or video, editing an interview, the pains and pleasures of release forms, payment, and working with editors.
As we'll see, interviewing is much more than just mechanically transcribing words to the page. Can I Quote You on That? guides you through the editing process of removing, adding, cleaning up, clarifying, and moving material within an interview by taking you through a first rough draft, a second draft showing editing decisions with bracketed changes followed by explanatory notes, and a third and final draft. Two complete examples fully demonstrate all three stages through separate interviews with Pete Von Sholly (The Fantastic Four, The Shawshank Redemption, and The Green Mile) and Martin Kove (Death Race 2000, The Karate Kid, and Once Upon a Time. . . in Hollywood).
William Nesbitt, Ph.D., is Professor of English at Beacon College in Leesburg, Florida. His articles, creative writing, reviews, and interviews have appeared in numerous publications including Aji, Manzano Mountain Review, PopMatters, The Rockpit, Beat Drama: Playwrights and Performances of the 'Howl' Generation, Beatdom, Route 7 Review, Popular Culture Review, The Southeast Review, and The Journal of Evolutionary Psychology. His books include Teaching Students with Learning Disabilities at Beacon College: Lessons from the Inside, Roger Corman's New World Pictures (1970-1983): An Oral History (volumes one and two), and Forsaken: The Making and Aftermath of Roger Corman's The Fantastic Four.
