Freelance Writer and Social Worker

11 Tips for Conducting a Terrific Phone Interview

This year, I've started writing a few articles for magazines and journals. I got lucky on the first few--the editors were perfectly happy with emailed questions and answers. Then came the day when an editor requested I call a source and interview her.

Great, I thought. Now what? Somehow I had survived more than eleven years in the writing business with only rare phone contact with my sources.

I was sure I was going to make a complete ass of myself, but I didn't. Furthermore, the editor was right. The quotes I got from that phone call were far better than anything I could have pulled from a politely-worded email.

Since then, I've done many phone interviews with different types of experts. In doing so, I've stumbled upon a few secrets I wish I had known the first time I picked up the phone and nervously made my first call to conduct an interview.

1. Record the Call...If Your Subject Agrees

I love recording phone calls. They allow me to listen to the subject rather than scribbling incomprehensible notes to myself. The recording also gives me some piece of mind, in case there is ever a dispute about what was or wasn't said. Of course, I always ask before I turn on the recorder. Not one subject has ever refused consent once I explained that the recordings were for my own personal use and that I would delete them after the article ran.

7 Things I Learned from Winning NaNoWriMo

November might mean Thanksgiving and black Friday to the uninitiated, but writers know it is National Novel Writing Month. Between 12:01 AM on November 1 and 11:59 PM on November 30, thousands of authors all over the world commit themselves to writing a 50,000 word novel.

2011 marked my first year as a NaNoWriMo participant. At 9:00 AM on November 30, I confirmed my word count at 50,200. I won!

So, what did I learn from my successful participation in NaNoWriMo? Actually, quite a lot.

1. Free-writing is fun.

In order to pound out 50,000 words in a single month, you have to put a choke collar on your inner editor and just allow the words to flow however they like. The results might cause your high school English teacher to faint in horror, but I guarantee you will have more fun--and more ideas for your fiction--than you've had in ages.

2. Procrastination = Pain

You can complete a 50,000-word novel at the relatively sedate pace of 1667 words per day. Or, you can do what I did, blow off a bunch of days, and then spend the day before zero hour writing 9000 words in an effort to catch up. Ow.

My Favorite Resources for Online Research

Normally, I think research is part of the fun of writing an article or ebook. It's fun to come up with obscure resources. When I have a deadline looming, however, and I need to get facts now, there are a few websites I know I can count on for basic support and information.

Here are my top six:

1. Google. Everyone has a favorite search engine. Google happens to be mine. Yes, the sheer number of responses to a keyword search can be overwhelming, but I'd always rather have too much information at my disposal than too little. Google also performs searches at lightning speed and usually orders the results intelligently enough that I can find the information I'm looking for on the first page. I also like it that if I can't find the information I'm looking for, Google will suggest different keywords to try.

How Much Research Is Too Much?

If someone invented a career track which allowed me to get paid for learning, I'd still be a fulltime student. I loved my years of undergraduate and graduate work, and what I loved best of all was writing research papers.

I pestered research librarians and spent hours picking through the card catalogs (yup, they still had card catalogs back then) or the Social Work Abstracts database to find exactly the source I needed.

It wasn't at all unusual for me to stop after a bout of fevered writing and rush back to the library to fill in gaps with additional research. Now that I'm a professional writer, I still love searching for that one amazing quote or that little-known fact that can make a dull article or story come alive.