This is my first visit to this forum. Sure wish I could have had all of your very valuable opinions before now. Nevertheless, my opinion:Transcripts of interviews taken many years past are best left alone and quoted in their entirity. Although we research "start with self and move backwards" when we start to write it seems that it's more logical to start at your beginning (wherever that is) and move to the present. Find your own voice, and don't even try to follow another. I'm not a writing expert, so know little about how it "should" be done, but it seems to me that "fiction" and "nonfiction" are not the same. I find it very difficult to make up conversations I did not have, did not hear, and only imagined. . .unless, of course, I identify them as such. Don't lose your own voice which trying to follow "the rules".