Tuesday 4 October 2011

How do they do that?

Pages and pages of wedding reports that read just like the celebrity wedding specials we all love - just how do we create them? Well, our Head of Words, Emma, trained at Cardiff University's School of Journalism and has been a professional writer for (*whispers*) about fifteen years, so we think that her training and experience really shows - no self-appointed 'freelance writers' here at Illustries!

To create the report, Emma gathers lots of information beforehand and then conducts interviews after the big day. We don’t attend, and we think that's important, as there are enough people to worry about at a wedding and above all, we think the happy couple want to remember what they thought of their day, not what we thought! We interview the couple – separately, if possible, because it is lovely to be surprised by the things the other half says – by telephone, frantically scribbling notes (we record the conversation too!). And then we interview the people they nominate - for CELEB, normally the Best Man.

Then it is time for heads down and lots of coffee as we write, edit, refine, edit, refine and edit again until we've got a lovely, bouncy, emotional and succinct record of the big day - we are firm believers in 'less is more' when it comes to words, we include thousands of them, but they are very carefully chosen!

Finally, our favourite bit: words and pictures get to meet each other. Lots of proofreading later and we get to our favourite part - sending the CELEB Magazine to our couple.

Cue squeals of delight (we hope!).

Check out our Guest Editor extract, on the right! ->