After you’ve transcribed the conversation, you’re faced with a raw pile of text. It needs to be polished and brought to life. By polishing, I mean an edit in which you:
make sure that every question has a meaningful answer, weeding out the blanks;
make sure there is logic in the text: put yourself in the reader’s shoes and see what might be unclear to a person who is new to the subject, make it clear – put references, explain terms;
work with the language: replace the crooked colloquial constructions with literary ones, if the crooked constructions do not reflect the character of the person or his interesting style of speech, simplify the sentence structure to make it easier to understand, weed out the clericalisms;
remove unnecessary things (boring passages, digressions that alienate the conversation from the subject of the interview, clarifying questions, if they do not make the text more piquant, funny or witty);
check the text for factual, grammatical, and spelling errors, paying special attention to names, titles, numbers, and terms.
And then you have to bring the text to life. No one has ever articulated it better than reporter Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich: “From the very first lines, hit him in the face and don’t let [the reader] come to his senses for a second. As soon as he comes to his senses, he immediately stops reading your text.
The interview should turn into a clean folding speech, a flight of original thought, or something so disgustingly appealing that you just can’t tear yourself away from it, that the reader is with you, that the reader is captivated, even if he doesn’t agree with or sympathize with the character. Sometimes this can be done by rearranging the questions, sometimes the questions can be rewritten a bit (not changing their meaning, but changing individual words), sometimes you need to add more illustrations, put individual stories in boxes, or expand the beginning with a story about the hero by quoting the most interesting things from other media.
But, again, sometimes it’s difficult without introductory questions, then you can’t get a straight “in the face. In this case you can get even with the headline and the lead (the first paragraph before the text, which introduces the reader to the story) – mention there all the highlights of the interview.
You’ll understand how to bring the text to life by rereading it several times, not in a row, but a couple of days apart, if you have them. You will see superfluous words, rough joints, unnatural expressions, you will see nonsense on nothing. And when you get it all right, you’ll be surprised.
An important point: you don’t rewrite the character’s words, you don’t distort his thoughts, you don’t destroy his personality, on the contrary, you help it all come out. Sometimes, for this to happen, you can put a ellipsis in the text and thus show that the person was thinking, you can show how the person began to argue with himself – don’t just leave the outcome of this argument, etc.