A Transcript Is Not A Story

For several days, I’ve been weighing the pros and cons of recording interviews. Reading Robert Boynton’s interview with Lawrence Weschler (The New New Journalism), I discovered a perspective, which, for me, tips the scale. Boynton says Lawrence Weschler is a storyteller—an author of what Weschler himself coins “writerly nonfiction.” He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and has published numerous examples of his particular brand of journalism/ literature. Weschler’s book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Mr. Weschler’s ideas about the exactitude of quotation and location are interesting, but what strikes me today is his opinion on recorded interviews:

Actually, the tape recorder falsifies the situation in two ways. First of all its presence falsifies the encounter. As any writer knows, the moment you turn the tape recorder off you get all the really good stuff. And that is even true in those cases where it seems that it no longer matters, that the person is completely relaxed about the thing’s presence.

The second way in which a tape recorder falsifies the record is that the transcript is an entirely false record of what has taken place between a subject and a journalist. For what is actually taking place is a series of communication events, which really makes it a symphonic interaction. These include your expression, my response to your expression (seeing you are bored, interested, excited), my voice going up, my voice going down, your voice going up, your voice going down…And none of that is conveyed in the flat transcript. The words themselves don’t approximate what actually took place between us. Phrased differently, what took place between us was a narrative, a story, and a transcript is not a story.

Technorati tags: Interviewing, Narrative, New Journalism