"Transforming 100 Notebooks into Thirty-five Thousand Words" by Sonia Nazario

Sonia Nazario writes about a fourteen year old boy's journey from Mexico to United States in search of his mother. Nazario reports the life of the boy after he is in the States. After a series of interviews, research and retracing Enrique's steps, she says, "I had a hundred and ten notebooks, hundred of hours of taped interviews, and typed notes from more than one hundred phone interviews." Looking at such a superfluous amount of information, she says,"I was overcome with a feeling of paralysis."

She knew she had reduce the information somehow.

The first step of the process was what her editor, Rick Meyer, insisted on: the transcribing stage. Nazario used six full weeks to write out all the reports she had collected using MS Word. This made everything organized and easier to keep track of. This is an important step especially since we have to sort of a report for our final project. Transcribing all our reports will organize them and make it easier to know what to use.

This leads to the next stage which is "garbaging it down." Nazario compresses all the information she has into the first rough draft. In this stage, Nazario ignores the left side of her brain. She only cares about the chronology of the records. She says," Chapter 1 began the day Enrique's mother stepped of her mother's porch, leaving her five-year-old son behind. It ended the day Enrique decided to step of the same porch and find her." I think this stage is really important for us because we have to tell our story. We don't want it to start with something that should have been placed at the end of our video. Nazarro said the draft had to through 10 more drafts before it was reduced to 35000 words.

Nazarro narrates how in getting to her goal she reduced the draft by taking out all the unnecessary characters and accounts. She realized that it was okay to leave some information out and skip some of them. Some details did not take away or add any meaning to the story of Enrique. However, some trivial information in the beginning was valuable in the end. For example, Enrique wearing two left shoes was evidence to the mother that she was really speaking to her so.

In the end, Nazaro says she is on the eleventh draft. It is not easy to cut down more information at this stage. However by asking her self questions like: "Is it  really necessary?," If I keep it, how can I make it better, shorter?" will help her. 

In the initial stages of my final project, I have taken a lot of advise from Nazaro's essay. I plan to make sure the account I present is very important and necessary in telling my story.