In writing the fractional biographies that are the Harm City project I have had to work without a recording device due to the criminal nature of many of the subjects. In other venues, it would simply be rude to break out a note pad and start jotting. There was an intense period of time when I did just this, lugging a binder with me for interviews.
In some cases—such as working a corner, working as a slave, being approached by a fighter at the gym, or having an impromptu conversation, while walking—I might find myself without the time or the implements to jot down snippets of conversation.
Below is my basic half-assed method, which certainly results in some paraphrasing and some inaccuracies. My goal is to capture the person’s character, the sense of being with them. As long as I get the key story elements correct I am more interested in recreating their tone and pace than reconstructing a word-for-word record, although I sometimes prefer this with certain people and ask for a sit down interview. With most people, the sit down interview causes them to shell up, so I prefer the following method.
1. Converse with the subject without taking any notes on any topic, preferably one not germane to my topic of interest. I am looking for monologue breaks, cadence, catch words, favorite phrases, and quirks. For instance Columbine Joe comes from the East Baltimore subculture in which it is common for white men to call one another brother. I wrote his first story as if I had just then met him when he told it. I, in fact, have been around him—as he is a customer where I work—for some months, and have listened to him speaking with others, though our conversation had generally been limited to the quality of the coffee. The night I ‘met’ Columbine Joe was the night I felt like I got to know him a little bit. I will do as many shorts with him as possible before I ask for a long story—this guy had to have run away as a kid, and strikes me as a modern Huckleberry Finn. So I’m saving that question until I know his speech patterns better.
2. I keep receipt papers in my wallet and a pen in my side pocket, so that after a conversation I can record a few common sentence examples for reference when reconstructing his monologue style.
3. The first time I am told a story—unless it is such an insane one that it burns into your mind, like Rock, Paper, Scissors—I just listen and think about the story, trying to remember how he told it.
4. I ask for a repeat of the story, ask for a time, and try and memorize three key lines, which I write down as soon as he is done the telling. Once I interviewed this Irish-American mobster who took my pen away, after he finally got drunk enough to tell me about torturing and killing a dude. I kept looping that story through my mind and ignored a really sweet girl who liked me, and as soon as he left the bar, ran home and wrote it down.
5. With step 3 as my backdrop, I use step 1 and 2 to reconstruct his speech around the recorded quotes along the narrative trajectory placed in my mind in this second telling [4]. Normally, unless he is a skilled and experienced story teller, or it was an arranged interview, I will get fragments on the first telling and the full narrative thereafter, particularly if this is the first time he has recounted the incident. If it was a traumatic recent incident numerous questions are often required to reconstruct the happening in his words.
This process has become therapeutic for a number of my subjects. Characters like Tattoo Rick and Columbine Joe, however, are generally telling tales oft told from years ago, which they can reel off the same way over and over again. Entertaining speakers like them and poetic speakers, like the older black men I interviewed in the 1990s, are very easy to commit to memory.
The black story telling tradition is rhythmic, is related to epic poetry, and eventually morphed like a nuked Japanese kid into the tragically seared mass called rap. At root, however, speaking in rhythm and rhyme is a mnemonic device, a system of information patterning utilized before the written word to permit a single person to recall something as vast as a 700 page book. The title of this article is a mnemonic idea hanger, all I had on paper, or in the forefront of my mind, when I began writing a half hour ago.
Highly intelligent characters like Andrew Metzger who speak in tangents are more difficult to reconstruct in dialogue or monologue, particularly since they tend to feed a lot of information [and most people don’t put much information into any sentence] into very long compound sentences and succeeding digressive paragraphs. I will usually settle with snagging one of these tangents and using it as a quote bracketed by my narrative. Guys like A.M. are why film documentaries are so important.
Of course, such nonfiction work pays big dividends when it comes to dialogue and character fabrication in the writing of fiction.
