Since learning to rely on G-Recorder earlier this year, I’ve found that the biggest benefit is how it allows me to listen. As long as I see the microphone and envelope icon beating in the tray, I can relax knowing the call is being recorded.

G-Recorder icon pulsates to show it's working

My need for “insurance” caused my one snag with G-Recorder. In an early interview, I captured the receptionist but not the call transfer to the client giving me the brain dump for his book. At the time I felt fortunate that I had also recorded this two-hour interview on Pamela, my old system. G-Recorder sent an update with a solution, but also said that using two recorders was likely the problem.

I haven’t had a conflict since I stopped also using Pamela. I prefer to trust the real insurance, which is that G-Recorder puts one copy on my hard drive and keeps one in the Gmail cloud.

Reading your writing aloud to pick up inconsistencies and make sure your voice flows smoothly is common practice. I got the rare treat of hearing how my writing voice sounds on film when I wrote and spoke the narration for “Winging My Way Back Home: The Stripling Fiddle Legacy.”

This intro has evolved into the trailer for the film about my dad, Lee Stripling, as Seattle filmmaker Jeri Vaughn works on the final version. It sets the tone but feels long, as if it delays meatier parts of the film. We welcome your suggestions.

Stripling Brothers Documentary from Jeri Vaughn on Vimeo.

“When you put your heart out to him, there’s his heart ready for you, and probably he goes first.” – Sandy Bradley, Northwest musician and the folklorist who found Charlie Stripling’s son in Seattle, helping my dad keep the music alive.

Finding the right voice to tell stories in second or third person is difficult. You have to muzzle The Writer, even though it’s you.

The Writer is too formal in early drafts. And then she’s too casual. She can’t find her way because she’s not confident enough of the details, and it shows.

Ivan Doig's This House of Sky: Always a favorite voice

To speed up familiarity, I keep copies of voices that I like near my desk. Once I’ve cleared a path through all the information, I pull out old favorites in hopes that the rhythm will rub off and serve as a knowing guide.

Occasionally, my own writing works. Here’s one lead I used to read from a story on whether Seattle had lost its soul:

“On a warm summer night last July, Barbara Curtis gave us a rare chance to see how well Seattle’s heart has endured. As Curtis, Seafair Queen of 1950, led the 1999 Torchlight Parade as grand marshal, she brought most of the crowd of 350,000 to its feet, inspiring a snaking roar of cheers as she passed.

That’s the Seattle of old: good-hearted, steadfast, always up for a hokey civic event – and dressed for a parade (even at the opera.).”

More often I reach for favorites reads. Almost any page will do from Gretel Erhlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces. Or I’ll read this descriptive paragraph about an old couple, Kate and Walter Badgett, in Ivan Doig’s wonderful “This House of Sky.”

“Atop that crate of a body was an owlish face, and a swift tongue that could operate Walter all day long and still have time to tell what the rest of Ringling was doing. On her desk by the front window which looked across the tracks to the gas station and post office-store, Kate kept her pair of binoculars. Who had come to town, for how long and maybe even what they bought − it all came up the magnifying tunnel of vision to Kate, then went out with new life, as if having added to itself while re-echoing through that bulk of body.”

Oh, to have a voice like that.

So far, so good in experiments with G-Recorder, another system for recording phone interviews via Skype. G-Recorder records both Skype chats and Skype calls automatically into my Gmail account.

G-Recorder for Skype calls and chats

In co-teaching a writing class for financial advisers recently, I expressed the idea that content is the new oil, a “precious resource” with real cost and real value as Gerry McGovern writes in “Killer Web Content: Make the Sale, Deliver the Service, Build the Brand.”

Merriman, Inc., formerly known as Merriman Capital Management, was an early leader in giving away quality content through their fund advice website, financial articles and books (often given free). In return, the company has received national attention, caché and ever-important links to its two websites.

Adding an exclusivity to some client profiles

Merriman is refining its approach to what it wants to give all visitors vs. what it wants to save for existing clients. For instance, my early profile writing was posted on the website. Now, my profiles are published twice a year in a newsletter given only to clients.

Advisers at this meeting talked about the fine line of providing real, usable information as part of their commitment to free educational resources but also the need to save their most comprehensive writing for the exclusive use of clients.

Quality content takes effort and skill. It has value so why not save the best to add value for committed clients?

Or, to continue the analogy: When oil is cheap, fewer people invest in the extra expense of a hybrid.

A newsletter editor I work with recently handed back a first draft of a client profile. He felt I’d lost the story’s pull by trying to write about a husband and wife equally. And he was right.

The profile was for a “giving back” feature. Both the husband and wife had dedicated a part of their lives to helping people change perspectives to become less judgmental of others and of themselves.

I had struggled to find a parallel that would work. In reality, the “hook” to the story was the drama of what led the wife to write a very nice photo and essay book about body image.

In trying to give the story balance, I’d lost the emotion and the motivation, or what PBS storyteller Ira Glass calls the two most important ingredients in a story: The “anecdote” and the “moment of reflection.”

Glass says to throw out the old idea of building on a theme and just go with this one-two punch.

The anecdote pulls us in. This happened, then that happened, and that made me think of this, he says. The suspense comes from constantly raising questions to keep people interested. Of course, you have to answer those questions along the way, which is the “moment of reflection,” what he calls the periodic stop to say, “This is why I’m telling you this.”

In newspaper writing, we used to call that the “nut” or “glom” graph: Here is the greater meaning and why it could be important to you.

In my case, I needed to start with the dramatic events that led the wife/photographer to wonder whether she could change how people viewed beauty so they would be more accepting of their bodies.

That gave me the hook. Though it left the poor husband with just a couple of supportive paragraphs, the positive response from readers of the book showed that people are hungry for a less judgmental world and provided credibility for the approach of both husband and wife.

It worked. The more powerful rewrite was a breeze.

In the past two months, I’ve written a dozen blog entries and a dozen bios for the Sept. 27, 2009 launch of “lifestyle insights | real women. real life.”, a division of Robin Avni’s “lifestyle topics, insights and trends.”

lifestyle insights: real women. real life.

Robin is an early escapee of traditional media, where she combined a rare eye for art and design with an ear for writing. I first knew her as art director for Pacific Magazine at The Seattle Times. I have since written for her in a variety of other capacities.

Now she is merging her past experiences – as an online pioneer with Microsoft, project manager, corporate trend consultant and writer – into new roles that include leading a team of lifestyle experts to develop corporate content for all media channels. I am happily on that team, as a writer and consultant.

I admire Robin’s vision, energy and the quality of talent she has pulled together for her all-woman team – food, home and garden stylists; green-building expert; filmmaker; food photographer; lifestyle and corporate coach; marketing/social media specialist; writers and editors.

My blog topics for our site fall under two umbrellas, “quality of life” and “utility player,” meaning I get to write about almost anything as long as I can spit it out under 300 words. For corporations, my writing will be more on-trend and market-specific but still lifestyle oriented.

Robin recognized a shift in communications between corporations and consumers. She knew most companies don’t have high-quality content teams in place.

Instead of ruing the loss of traditional media, we are taking advantage of the multi-channeled story telling opportunities provided by new media. After riding the downward trend at newspapers for years, this is an awfully nice position to be in.

I begin work this week creating the narration for the documentary on my father, fiddle player Lee Stripling. Though the hard work has been done by others, the narration may have a major role. First I need to restructure the story line to bring the focus back through the filter of my father’s experience. Then I must use the narration as the thread from which to hang all the golden nuggets, which include:

• The importance of his father, Charlie Stripling, Alabama’s most recorded fiddler
• My father’s role in passing on a music heritage he learned at the knee of fiddlers who date back as far as the Civil War

A flyer for a preview shown at 2008 Fiddle Tunes

There are 30 hours of rich video shot on location in rural Alabama, Seattle, the Berkeley Old Time Music Festival, and the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, WA. Fittingly, a preview of “Winging My Way Back Home: The Stripling Fiddle Legacy,” was shown at Fiddle Tunes last summer when my father, then 86, was once again on the faculty.

The documentary was instigated by his bass player, Tony Mates, in 2005, and brought to fruition by Jeri Vaughn, now of Frause Visual. I wrote and spoke the narrative introduction to the preview version. More key interviews were added in a second edit last winter adding insight but losing some of the story’s drive.

Thus, Vaughn the director has called me back as loving narrator, attempting what she optimistically hopes will be a blend of “Scout” in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” with NPR’s wonderful Bailey White in anything.

Hearing how stories sound when read aloud has always been a key writing tool for me. That’s made writing and speaking narration feel surprisingly like home.

Vaughn wants to recapture the warmth, optimism and sense of survival she felt when reading the version of my father’s story that I wrote for The Seattle Times in 2002. That story told of how fiddle music had twice been my father’s salvation, first as a sharecropper’s son in Alabama, and then, picking up the fiddle after decades of absence, as a man in his 70s grieving for my mother.

We will try to seamlessly blend in lessons from the Great Depression and why my Alabama grandfather’s music is played throughout the Northwest, where old-time music thrives today. By filtering it through my father’s story, I hope we can show his essence, which is:

How he passes on the benefits of kindness, optimism and maintaining a zest for life along with the toe-tapping music from America’s roots.

I’ll keep you posted on our progress.