Sorry if this is the wrong part of the forum to post this. Please move the thread if necessary. In my novel, there is a chapter fully on video interviews, each interview will have a number and will go in chronological order. There are about 10+ interviews and I am having a hard time getting through them. Any suggestions on how you guys would prepare, set yourself up, organize and what not? There will be no in between scenes. Just one interview after another and I feel unorganized with it. I use Microsoft Word to write. Thank you.
The interviews are fiction and will be narrated. It's sort of a psychological mystery. A man looking for a woman. He begins filming his search to make a documentary out of it.
In "World War Z", I think each chapter started as an interview. I like that approach. It leaves you a lot of room to move around in the story and also gives you a solid starting point. you don't seem to have to wrestle so much with characters and stories if you begin with a summary of their story, in interview form, and then flesh it out as though the interview was the introductory paragraph to a one chapter essay. If you are stuck on keeping them in a single chapter, I'd make them like a conversation. Interviewer-interviewee style, rather than a series of monologues.
For my writing style I found just writing it and figuring out the order and transitions after the chapters were written worked best.
Stick to the important/relevant bits. Don't write about the entire interview because I think a lot of readers will get bored of reading interview after interview. Think of it like a movie scene where two characters are having dinner. Do we, the viewers, have to sit through the entire meal and listen to the entire conversation? No (unless it's relevant somehow). We only get a few minutes of anything important we need to know and then the scene ends. Try the same approach here, and see if you like it.
Are the interviews done actually one after the other or is that how you plan to present them? Who does 10 interviews in one day? Maybe a temp agency? Given that, how significant will they actually be? Personally, I would stick the interviews in the story where they would be most significant. It's all about the reveal. I fear 10 in a row might be overload.
In Stephen King's Carrie, the each chapter in the story is preceded by a short "interview" chapter with someone who knew Carrie or survived the incident. It's done either as a news article or psychology paper.
