LRN No.22: superpowers and millstones
Plus: hewn into the living rock of Stonehenge
I checked in an article to my editor this morning. The transcript of the interview at the heart of that article was 27,500 words. To put that in context: the entire manuscript of my most recent book is 85,000 words.
This is not normal - but it wasn’t a normal interview. It lasted five hours; it was with two people, one of whom spoke in grand orations that became vast paragraphs, and some quite shocking things happened in real time during that interview that I had to document properly.
But still.
Five hours on my voice recorder.
27,500 words.
52 pages in an 11-point font.
And I did it all myself - no AI involved; no eager assistant happy to type it all out for me. It took me a week to write that transcript, before a word of the actual article itself had been written.
Transcription is my least favourite part of being a journalist. Even if I had secured an exclusive interview with God, typing it out would still be fist-gnawingly dull. But I have made my peace with it. I have to do it myself, even though it’s excruciating, even though I could pay other people to do it, or even get software to do it for free. I do it because I have realised it gives me superpowers.
When you do your own transcription, you really have to listen. You know your material inside out. You begin to hear the music of how the finished piece will sound. You get to reflect on the interview in a way you would never get to if you were simply reading a transcript produced by someone and something else. You get to punctuate things properly. You aren’t stumped by accents in the way a Chinese or American robot tends to be.
Transcription may be a millstone, but really, truly listening to what your interviewee is saying - and how - is a superpower. In an age of tiny attention spans and clickbait headlines, you need to spend time to really listen if you are going to go long and deep. This isn’t a very sustainable way to make a living if you are paid for what you produce, rather than the time it took to produce it, but to know your subject inside and out, it’s the only way to do it. Dammit.
In other news - if you’ve read The Price of Life you will know Corey and Nicholas, the couple in Chapter Six who were shut out of biological parenthood because they didn’t have a spare $200,000 to spend creating a life. (Latest estimates put that figure at over $260,000 now, for gay couples in New York.)
They are suing the city of New York in a class action lawsuit, claiming the city’s definition of infertility discriminates against gay men. If they win, they will set a legal precedent that defines all gay men as infertile, regardless of their medical history.
I wrote about their lawsuit here. (I found writing a news article surprisingly hard - probably because it was just 900 words.)
Things that have caught my eyes and ears:
Saw Orbital at the Troxy, and delighted in seeing so many bald men in their forties and fifties reliving the most joyful years of their lives
Loved the bonkers brilliance of When Forms Come Alive at the Hayward Gallery
Enjoyed Underdog: The Other Other Brontë at the National Theatre - a weird and funny play about sisters and writing
Was grateful to India Knight’s Substack after I spent the perfect May Bank Holiday weekend in a cottage/hot tub in Somerset on her recommendation
Managed to drive to said cottage/hot tub in Somerset and play my kids Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge while driving past actual Stonehenge. A pinnacle of parenting.
Was wondering why you wouldn't use software. And then you explained it. It does seem like a lot of work. I've been transcribing my diary. Sometimes I read it to Word dictation mode or Google notes which are pretty good. But going back to do corrections is less fun than getting it right first time.