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.