How to Use Quotes
Don’t overdo it and don’t underdo it
I love compliments of any sort, but I’m always a little thrown off when people compliment me on the quotes in my stories. In a way, I don’t feel I deserve credit for simply presenting what other people have said, but I’ve come to realize using quotes is a lot more involved than just being good at transcribing.
The first challenge, of course, is plucking the best bits out of a longer interview. If you’re like me, you spend loads of time with your subjects, and a good portion of that time is spent shooting the breeze, getting to know one another, commenting on irrelevant things like the weather or the time. That’s all valuable; it’s the necessary groundwork for getting to the more salient points. But none of that is likely to end up in your story as a quote.
Where you find the good quotes is in the meaty part of the conversation, after you’ve done all the throat-clearing and time-wasting and start to talk more about what matters. That might constitute a very small part of the time you’ve spent, but don’t despair. Most of us fill the air with a lot of chit-chat rather than substantive observations, so it’s just natural that you’ll have pages and pages of stuff that isn’t quotable. The ratio is always low. That’s the way people talk — especially a subject and an interviewer, who are already navigating a…
