On how ghostwriting is like dancing, but dancing is so different from what you think

Partner Dancing

Men tell me things they don’t tell anyone else. I mean, it’s my job to listen to people tell the stories of their lives. And a lot of those people are men, and sometimes they say wildly sexist things, but it’s because these are their true beliefs. It’s not my job to enlighten them, and … Read more

AI Will Not Replace Me

AI Robot

In a conversation, recently, a friend suggested that Chat GPT was going to replace me pretty soon. I had to laugh. There are some very good reasons why a robot can’t replace me, and I think this is important to talk about for the sake of writers and creative people everywhere. People seem to think … Read more

Writing Style Should Fit the Tale to be Told

fountain pen nib

One of my favorite aspects of ghostwriting memoirs is when I have gathered all the information for the book and I get to choose the style I’ll write it in. To me, style is everything, and I don’t choose a writing style lightly.

A Look at Some Writing Style Options

I have to ask myself: does the book want to read clipped and straightforward, like a detective novel; folksy and casual, like a southern novel; or complex and involved like a political thriller? In making the selection, I have to look at the information needing to be conveyed.

Basically, the more complex the storyline, the more creative I have to get with the writing style. For instance, the book I’m ghostwriting now involves a man’s life set against a very complicated political background, so the amount of information that has to be conveyed in each chapter is immense.

It’s like basically writing two books in one. I had to think about how I was going to bring across all this information, because one technique won’t do it. When there’s a lot of exposition like that, it can’t all be given through dialogue, hindsight narrative, asides, or any single technique. It has to come across through a variety of techniques so that the reader doesn’t catch on to how she’s being educated as she reads.

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Writing Teen Memoirs

teenagers sitting against a brick wall

The most interesting writing-oriented thing that’s happened lately is the final edits on this bank robbery book. It’s interesting how they’ve come about. I’m ghostwriting this book for a client, where the plot is fictional but the characters and their backstory are based upon real people. We came up with this compromise as a way of solving an interesting problem: the story she really wanted to write was about herself and her friends as teens; however, she didn’t want to write a straight memoir, but a novel. But if you’re going to write a novel about teens, and pursue mass-market publication, it’s usually got to be in the Young Adult genre.

That’s just how the publishing industry works; I know, it ain’t right. She really didn’t want to write a YA, so we created a fictional story that takes place when the characters are adults, but referenced their childhoods when referring to the back story, and that’s the origin of this unusual project. Which is why, in the final edits, things got kind of weird.

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