#397: Writing Well: 3 Simple Ways to Use Interviews to Write Your Book

Welcome to Kingdom Writers, where we help equip and empower Christian writers of all genres to share your unique gifts with the world. We're your hosts, C.J. and Shelley Hitz.

This podcast is filled with spiritual encouragement as well as prayers to help you overcome the resistance you face as a writer. Your story matters.

Are you sometimes at a loss for words for what to write in your book? Do you wonder how to get unstuck? Well, if you're writing a nonfiction book, one way is to use interviews. Hi, my name is Shelly Hitz. I'm one of the hosts here at the Kingdom Writers Podcast and the founder of ChristianBookAcademy.com where. Where we help you take a step of faith to finally finish your book so God can use the message to impact lives. I'm going to talk today in this episode about how you can use interviews to write your book. So let's dive right in. The first way you can use an interview to write your book is to have somebody there with you asking you questions and then record it using the app Otter AI. It's O T T E R A I. You can use it for a certain amount of minutes for free. And what it will do is it will record the audio, but along with the audio, it will create an automatic transcription. This is amazing. And we did this recently when we were helping my dad to write his book. It's a memoir about his brain injury. It's called bounce back Choosing to rise with when life knocks you down. And I would sit at the dinner table after we were finished eating dinner and we were talking and I would just ask him some questions and I would have my phone on the table. And so it wasn't like you're sitting in front of a microphone or.

It wasn't performance based at all. And we were just talking, we were having a conversation and I recorded it using the Otter AI app. And then I would take that transcript and edit it. And so this was a great way for us to get more content from my dad because of his brain injury. We just, you know, it was difficult to be able to get the content from him. I wanted it to be his words and I didn't want to be ghost writing it for him. I just wanted to be assisting him in getting his message out. So if you're stuck and you're not sure what to say next, have some questions that somebody asks you and then just use the Otter AI app and just sit down like at a coffee shop or somewhere. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. There can be background noise. It just has to be able to pick up your voice and then it can transcribe it and you can pull out the pieces from there that, that you share. And I just feel like there's sometimes things that will come out of you in a conversation when with someone else, you know, speaking eye to eye to them than when you're just sitting at your computer screen staring at a computer screen. Even if you're an introvert. I just feel like there's something that happens that, that there may just be some magic that comes out that you can then extract from the transcript and use in your book. Okay, so number one is to use the Otter AI app. Number two is host a zoom call with one, an other person or maybe a few people that can be asking you questions and having a conversation with them. So you would record the zoom call and then you would have it transcribed. There are several different ways you can transcribe it. I recommend Descript. So Descript is a video editing software that is incredible and you can just sign up for one month to get the pro version of it. First of all, like there it's amazing like if you do want to have any kind of video content you can edit by way of the transcript. So the it's not, you know, you don't have to like listen to everything. And it's not the old way of, of editing. It is so easy. Plus they have this thing called Studio sound when you have a paid account. I have tried it on old Zoom files that I before I upgraded my microphone. It really makes a difference. You can remove filler words, you can break down your video by scenes, export those scenes. I've been doing that recently for this Christian Book Academy curriculum. But for this particular instance you can upload your video and it will automatically transcribe it for you. And then you can take that transcript and edit it and use what you want from there. There's also a tool called Cast Magic and it will take your your file and it will give you summaries and it will give you highlights and it will and it will give you all sorts of information. And this uses the AI, but it's just Castmagic IO. I had originally purchased this through a one time fee from AppSumo but right now it's a monthly fee. But it might be something that, that you want to look into as well for transcripts because it gives you a summary of extracts information from that file that then might help you organize the content a little bit easier and quicker from your transcript. So the first option is to use Otter AI. It's an app that records audio only and transcribes it. The second option is to host a Zoom call and use a tool like Descript or Cast Magic to transcribe it. And then the third option is just to write it out. So have someone send you some questions. You could conduct a survey of your audience or maybe even just compile questions people have been asking you. Maybe it's not even that you have an audience yet online, but you've had friends or people ask you questions about your story or about this certain topic that you're writing about. Maybe you're writing a cookbook and you always get people asking you certain types of questions. Maybe that can be some of the content, the extra content in that cookbook, or if there's certain recipes they're always asking you for. You know, if you have an incredible testimony, maybe there's something that people are always asking you or wanting to know more about and you can use that and then just write it out as if you're writing an email to a friend. And it just, I think it just is a different mindset than I'm sitting down to write a book, right? Like it takes some of the formality out of it. Like I'm sitting down with a friend, friend and we're talking about this and we're just, we have the phone out and recording on Otter AI or I'm meeting on Zoom and I'm looking at someone in the eyes and we're talking about this topic or this, this story that I want to share. Or you know, you're having questions and you're, you're writing the responses and you're sending them back to people. Like it's like an email and you're having conversations. So you, you know, if you're stuck and you're writing a non fiction book, it may be helpful to try one of these options to use interviews and really think about. Like, what would you say to somebody if you're sitting down across the table from them at a coffee shop and actually do it because it's more relational, it kind of gets you out of your head. And when we're sitting down at a computer or when we're sitting down to write, many times the inner critic creeps up and says, oh, you're spelling that wrong, or oh, I need to fix that grammar, or oh, you know, the editor part comes out and then that conflicts with just getting the content out. So sometimes it is just helpful to get that content out of your head and onto paper, eliminating that other part, that inner critic. Because especially if you're sitting down with someone else, you're not going to say, oh, wait, hold on, I need to, to correct this, or wait a second, I'm going to do, you know. No, you're going to just keep going. You're going to keep talking, you're going to keep sharing. And then in another session you can get the transcript and then you can pick and choose what you want to keep, what you're not going to keep. What was the gold from that session? And we actually had a lot of really great content that came out of those sessions with my dad where I was just asking him questions and he was responding and then I could use his words in his book. And you know, if you're ghostwriting, this is also another great option for you to use. So I hope that this was helpful for you. Just three simple ways to use interviews to write your book again. To recap, you can use the Otter O T T E R AI app. You can host a Zoom call and record it and have it transcribed with a tool like Description Script or Cast Magic. Or you can just write it out, you know, have someone send you questions and, or conduct a survey or compile questions people have been asking you and then write it out as if you're writing an email to a friend and actually send it to the person that, that asked the question if, if you are able to, because it also gives you some accountability. But more than anything else, we want you to share your story, to get your book out of your head and onto paper. And so we would love to have you join us in bookacademy.com we recently launched progress pods and after eight and a half years of having this membership, this is one of the best ways I have found to help you move forward and have accountability. So a Progress Pod is just a small group that meets together weekly to share their highlights, insights and accomplishments from the previous week. You also identify and you take note and you track your next tiny step that you're going to take this week to help you move forward. So it's a place to be encouraged and to make incredible progress and get results much faster than doing it on your own. So I hired an accountability expert and we're using his system, the next tiny step, and his software to do this. And I have invested in this because I believe in you, I believe in your book. I believe God has more for each one of us. And sometimes we just need someone to come beside us and, and walk beside us. So we have trained our Progress POD leaders. We've opened them up and we'd love to have you join us. Come and join us@christianbookacademy.com and I will talk to you in the next episode. Bye Bye.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Kingdom Writers. We believe that you, as a Christian writer, have have a specific role to play in the Kingdom of Heaven to impact lives for eternity.

And because of this, we choose to pour out our lives into encouraging writers like you to not only tell your stories, but to take the courageous step of self publishing your stories in books that will outlive you and leave behind a powerful legacy. This podcast is sponsored by Christian Book Academy where we help you give books birth to your books. We invite you to join our community of Kingdom Writers.