Counting Words

For Issue #45 of Outburn, I interviewed The Gaslight Anthem.  I have my copy, but I'm not sure if it's in stores yet.  Look for Underoath on the cover.

The thing about writing anything is that you're given a finite amount of space to try and contextualize the seemingly infinite array of ideas that can be conveyed in one conversation with a person.  You might thing that this changes with a Q/A piece, as the format more or less takes the narrative issues out of the hands of the journalist and places them in the care of the interviewee (I say more or less because the journalist is still responsible for the questions and therefore guides the narrative).  However, your typical interview that doesn't suck is going to extend to at least 3,000 words (roughly a half-hour of tape), oftentimes it will be 5,000-6,000 or more.  Now, a lot of the word space will consist of awkward trains of thought and chit-chat, but at least half of it (considering this is a good interview) will spark thoughts of, hey, this is really freakin' cool, fans will love to hear about this.  Still, though, you're dealing with way more than 1,000 words and chances are the word count is somewhere between 800 and 1200 and that's including an introduction that will probably run about 300 words.

So, unless your interview is an abysmal mess of yes or no questions and one line answers, the chances of much more than 1/4 of your interview actually making it into the story is slim.  As a writer, you learn to deal with it.  First you go through and take out the tangents that are repetitive and/or make no sense.  Then you get into the whole "baby killing" process, where you have to decide which chunks get cut regardless of how much attachment you feel to the segment.  You have to keep everything in line, follow the major theme that ran through the interview, get all the nuts and bolts into the piece and keep it cohesive.  After all, if you hit points A, B, C and D and then jump back to B before heading to E, swooping towards H and then backtracking to F and G, the reader is going to get lost.

All that is to say is that I did a hell of a lot of editing before turning in this story.  In fact, I think it took more time for me to cut and past the original transcript into a new document than it did to transcribe the original 40 minute or so, overseas phone call.  And there was a lot in the conversation that I found quite intriguing.  Once I'm sure that the magazine is out and you can read the final product, I might post a few of the edited bits here.