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As someone who traffics primarily in journalism, I’ve long been obsessed with the debate between using a tape/voice recorder or old-school furious note-taking. I prefer the latter but often default to the former, fearing what I might miss, knowing what a recorder will catch for me. Both have pros and cons. A reliable recorder with adequate battery life will capture everything with 100% accuracy. But transcribing—even with AI—is a burden. Scribbling like mad into a notebook has a natural way of filtering out the garbage; what’s sticky stays. But it’s close to impossible to get every word and depending on your handwriting, you might lose stuff because you can’t read what you wrote—an infuriating “bug” in the note-taking system. It’s a matter of personal preference. In this excerpt from Episode 422 of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, I talk to journalist and author Darcy Frey, who celebrates the 30th anniversary of his masterpiece The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams. He made a pact with himself early on: no recorders.

This excerpt has been edited for clarity and concision. Subscribe to The Creative Nonfiction Podcast wherever you get your podcasts to hear this conversation—and hundreds of others—in full.

—Brendan O’Meara

Brendan: You’re spending hours with kids in neighborhoods and gyms and classrooms. You’re also driving them around. How do you document all the information?

Darcy: Yeah, that’s funny. My little Toyota hatchback was like the confession booth. We would drive around endlessly. Partly, I would drive them to games and practices. And sometimes they would just want to go over to another neighborhood where one of the players’ brothers had a barber shop. But something happens with kids of all ages, you get in the car, and it’s moving, and you just start talking—everybody starts talking. So it’s just a wonderful kind of reporting tool. Everybody would be just relaxed and talking. 

But of course, there’s a hitch there, which is how do you record it all? Early on, when I started doing narrative journalism, I made a decision not to use a tape recorder. You do get the accuracy of a verbatim recording if you use a handheld tape recorder, but you have to transcribe everything. So it doubles your research time, every hour in the field is another hour or more that you have to spend listening to it. But, more importantly, when I did use a tape recorder, I listened less acutely than I did when I was simply taking notes.

If you’re taking notes, and you don’t get it down because you’re not listening—if you’re not paying sufficient attention—it’s gone forever. You have no backup. That was useful to me. And, paradoxically, though, I was bent over my notebook all the time, because I was listening so carefully, I actually interacted with the kids more naturally, and certainly with more attention to what they were saying. 

But, more importantly, when I did use a tape recorder, I listened less acutely than I did when I was simply taking notes.

But when we were in the car, it was all crazy. I had a steno pad that I kept on my knee. And then when I’d hit a red light, I would just write as fast as I could. Whatever was said in the intervening four or five blocks, I put it down, put the car in gear, and moved forward. As soon as I got out of the car, I would look back over those notes, I would see all the phrases that I’d quickly written down and I just filled it out with dialogue. It’s always most important to get what people say down first, that’s sort of the first level of reporting, but I knew that when I was going to be writing the book many months later, I was going to need much more than just what was said. I was going to need gestures and mood and what the weather was like, how hot it was, facial expressions, and things like that. 

So, first line of reporting, I always wanted to get down what was said as accurately as I could. As soon as I got that down, I would fill in the margins with absolutely every detail I could vacuum up, knowing that when I was trying to recreate these moments, these dramatized scenes, I was going to need dialogue. But I was going to need a lot more to make it seem alive to the reader.

Brendan: At the end of the day, would you go and clean up your notebooks and try to spackle in the holes of what was legible versus illegible? 

Darcy: Yes, exactly. So as soon as my reporting was done, I would go home. I would never permit myself to do anything, make dinner, nothing, until I’d sat down with the notebooks. I reread what I had written for exactly that reason—so that I wouldn’t look at it three months later and have no idea. So I would go through and I’d spackle in the holes and then I would put in all that sort of remembered detail about what was going on. If we were walking down the street, what did it feel like, what did the neighborhood feel like, stuff like that.

The first reported piece I did for Dick [Todd] at New England Monthly, I attended an event and it went very late at night. I went to sleep and the next morning I tried to download my short-term memory of what had happened and half of it was gone. And then I realized you can never permit yourself to sleep until you purge your mind of all those details, get them into a notebook. And then you can make dinner, take a shower, go to sleep, but you’ve got to get it done first.

Check out the full conversation below.