Back at my cluttered desk, I adjusted my headphones and stared blankly at the blinking cursor on my laptop as I thought of the best way to start transcribing.
I checked the duration of the transcriptions I was about to work on. Thirty minutes, fifty minutes, another fifty minutes and one hour. I smiled. This is very easy, I thought.
Now, to the business of the day: transcription proper. A bowl of peanuts on my table that I will munch away as I work, and a glass of cold juice to cool off.
With my fingers on the recorder, I hit play. Chief’s voice crackled to life in my ears, rich with experience and accent-laced authority. At first, I smiled, remembering how awkward the first fifteen minutes of the interview had been. But as I started typing, reality hit.
The words overlapped.
His voice dipped just as he was about to name a key historical figure.
A passing car honked loudly in the background, muffling an entire paragraph.
I sighed, paused the recording, and rewound.
“Was it Ibadan he said? Or Ibarapa?” I muttered, my fingers hovering over the keys. “And did he say General or journal?”
I rewound again, this was the third time I was doing it, and I still couldn’t get what the line was saying.
It was barely 11 a.m., and already, I felt the early pangs of burnout as I yawned, deeply stressing myself and cracking my knuckles.
I was tempted to throw in the towel, “I can’t kill myself,” I whispered to myself, throwing some peanuts into my mouth and with the other hand, took a sip of the juice. Then comes that tiny voice telling me to push a little more… I can do it.
I leaned back, staring at my screen. Only thirty minutes of audio and five sub-headings transcribed, and it seemed like ages. Four hours and fifty-three minutes more to go. My deadline was two days away. I haven’t even begun the actual writing.
The words danced mockingly on the screen.
My fingers ached. My back tensed.
Still, I pressed on.
Occasionally, I would pause the recording and close my eyes, trying to decipher a phrase from memory. Other times, I’d replay the same 10 seconds again and again, scribbling phonetic guesses until the Chief’s words finally clicked.
But it wasn’t just the audio quality. It was also the emotional weight.
Midway through the interview, Chief Olanrewaju spoke about a difficult moment when he went through some turbulent moments. In the section, he had spoken in whispers, soaked in hesitation. I could feel his pain, in spite of the not-so-clear audio. What exactly did he say? I rewound. Played it again. And again.
Then, a phrase, crystal clear, rose from the recording like a single thread.
“Love has no rank. But the service does.”
There it was. The hook. The heartbeat of the story. A phrase that distilled his entire struggle, the tension between duty and desire.
I smiled, and for the first time that day, I sat up straighter.
Suddenly, everything made sense: the interview, the struggle, the silence that followed that sentence. I had the emotional spine I needed for the initial chapters.
Fueled by that moment of clarity, my fingers resumed their quiet dance across the keyboard. The bowl of peanuts was almost gone now, and the glass of juice, very empty.
That’s the thing about ghostwriting, I thought. It’s not just writing, listening, or the feeling of chasing whispers through recordings and waiting for the story to finally speak back.
That day, after four hours, I had to take a two-hour rest, as my eyes were already feeling tired. It dawned on me that transcription wasn’t what I thought it was.
A fresh understanding of transcription and its nitty-gritty came to me. I heaved a sigh of relief as I penned down the last words from the recordings, glad that I had survived that day, hopeful that the next day would be better.
Chisom Esther Udechukwu
Content Writer Genius, TruMemories by BAC