Ghostwriting Is Detective Work

Pay attention to people — they have answers for you

People often imagine ghostwriting as a writing exercise. I don’t. Long before I begin writing, I’m trying to solve a mystery. 

My job is to discover how another person thinks, how they see the world, and ultimately how they would have written the book if they possessed the time and ability to do it themselves.

Ghostwriting is detective work.

An author has a book idea filled with details they took the time to make sense of. It's a great idea: it has definition, order, and charisma. It’s part themselves and part invention, and they are looking for someone to capture their big glorious idea across several hundred pages.

People get intimidated by their own idea. Plenty of brilliant people have book ideas who don’t write books. That’s because they are mothers, husbands, and professionals with their time already decided. 

Writing a book takes planning and execution of a lot of details to make it work. Some people don’t want to take on these large-canvas projects. 

Many people know where to begin, but they don't know how to execute. It can be overwhelming. Writing a book is really a full-time job. That's why many academics take five or ten years to put out a new book.

Over weeks or years, people piece together their book ideas on scraps of paper, napkins, thumb-typed phone notes, legal pads, and Word documents. Some make flow charts, graphs, take photographs — Some authors have organized all that ephemera into ordered notes or even a comprehensive outline. They collect all this ephemera, and they give it to me.

My job is to make sense of their notes. They’ve hired me to take the universe of ideas they’ve created over the years and confidently turn it into a thrilling manuscript people will love to read.

Ghostwriting is finding the exact way to replicate how another person expresses themselves in writing.

Much of what you communicate comes from things you never actually say. A ghostwriter draws from every facet of your communication to capture your voice on the page. Through conversation, writing samples, and even tone and body language, a ghostwriter can carry your message across the page and capture its nuance.

A ghostwriter will also listen to and watch the author speak, asking them to talk candidly about their project; observing where they place emphasis or deem something unimportant; listening for their word choices and information-giving style and recognizing where confidence and doubt populate their ideas.

Reading material related to the author’s project is ideal, even if it consists only of project notes rather than polished copy ready to be scrutinized, but it is not necessary.

Listening to someone talk helps you understand their word choices, depth, understanding of how something works, and familiarity with a person, thing, or concept. It also reveals what they naturally emphasize, what they pass over quickly, and where their certainty or hesitation begins to emerge.

You begin to notice patterns.

Some people explain ideas by telling stories. Others build arguments. Some naturally use humor. Others speak in carefully organized layers. Those habits become fingerprints, and fingerprints are exactly what a ghostwriter is looking for.

The ghostwriter must understand the author they’re collaborating with.

Conversation opens the door to how a person thinks. What an author expresses conversationally about their book idea is important, and how they express it is almost as important. You can say something brilliant, but if the phrasing is awkward or the sense is confused, readers will look elsewhere for what they want.

Ghostwriting is a collaboration as soon as it becomes detective work for the writer. Familiarity and the bond between author and ghostwriter create the atmosphere from which ideas flow freely, are recorded skillfully, and are rendered with the character of the author’s intended expression.

The more familiar the relationship between author and ghostwriter becomes, the more confidently they can express and work through concepts together, which is necessary for a project to remain authentic all the way through.

It gives the ghostwriter the do’s and don’ts for expressing that person’s story in writing.

Narrative is fundamentally different from speech. An author may speak idiomatically but write formally; they may favor a broad use of sophisticated language and also use casual phrasing, the highs and lows of grammatical expression, and humor. They may repeatedly tell stories chronologically, circle back to certain details, use humor when discussing difficult subjects, or consistently choose plain language over technical language. These are clues to how that author communicates, but not a dead giveaway for how they typically, or intend to, express themselves in writing.

Some authors are open to how the prose is set as long as every point of their story is told; others specify exactly how the tone and content should be expressed. Either can be as straightforward as the ghostwriter going through a few iterations before writing what they know of the author and having that attempt succeed, or getting feedback that some of their phrasing and word choices aren't the most accurate.

The ghostwriter can translate those clues into prose by following the same patterns on the page: organizing stories chronologically, returning to details the author naturally emphasizes, using the style of humor the author would use, or choosing plain language when that is how the author naturally expresses an idea.

This comes from listening, note-taking, writing, and rewriting.

The writing itself is only one part of the process. Observation, curiosity, and careful listening are just as important. A ghostwriter who isn’t interested in people will struggle to write convincingly on an author’s behalf. A lack of interest in people may put the author’s ideas on the page, but the words will lack heart.

The goal is never to imitate someone’s sentences. The goal is to understand the way the author expresses themselves so their sentences flow naturally onto the page.

When people ask me what ghostwriting is, I think about the conversations that came before the writing began. The hours spent listening to the author. The questions that uncovered ideas the author didn’t know they had. The details that gradually reveal how a person naturally communicates.

That’s why I think of ghostwriting as detective work. The investigation takes shape when an author chooses a ghostwriter to collaborate with on their book idea. The manuscript isn’t where the investigation begins; it’s where everything discovered along the way becomes visible.