Why I’m a Ghostwriter
Why writing for other people is more gratifying than writing for myself
Six years ago I started marketing myself as a ghostwriter and stopped writing fiction. It wasn’t a conscious decision. I didn’t go through a crisis. I stopped writing fiction when I left graduate school, but I still write creatively. I write what I like, and I like to write for other people.
Writing fiction is all about expressing your ego. The greatest books, Ulysses In Search of Lost Time, and everything that came before and after them under the banner of fiction, come from a desire for personal glory.
Pursuing ego on the page is a noble feat replete with stellar results. The world has benefited from novels, while plenty of authors have chosen to put their work out without flashing their names—Thomas Pynchon, Elena Ferrante, Cormac McCarthy, and J.D. Salinger are four writers who come to mind.
The culture of creative writing implicitly teaches you that the ultimate goal is to put your own name on the spine of a book — that true art only happens in solitary isolation and is for the sole glory of one person.
The reality is that when a book is put out, dozens of people are involved. The cover artist, the editor, the publisher (from a corporate angle), the readers and advisors, the author, and sometimes a ghostwriter.
Now my writing had plenty of admirers, but my readership was private. I’ve had two book deals and left my manuscripts in the drawer. Publishing under my own name has never been anything I’ve been thrilled with doing. I love to write. I write, and that’s it.
My best energy lives in the space of the idea you bring to me, from which we write your book together. It's your idea, your vision; I’ll help you put it together.
When you hire me to write your book, you’re the only person I’m writing a book for.
Collaborating with someone to share their life expertise and raw vision to shape it into captivating prose told in their voice requires every ounce of creative technique I possess and twice the energy for a single purpose – turning your idea into a book you and your readers love.
Ghostwriting large canvas projects is a collaborative effort over a year or longer. It’s all about the idea and the relationship between author and ghostwriter: You like the person who’s writing for you, and I like you. That’s how we take your idea and turn it into a book people will buy.
Hire someone you like who you know is talented. Why would someone pay a large sum of cash to work with somebody that they didn’t like? You could go this route if it were a sterile, business-only arrangement where you invest in your writer because they’re supremely talented, but you don’t feel comfortable talking with them, so you give them the info they need and wait for them to deliver a book.
I work with people who have great ideas. They’re typically doing well for themselves sometimes.
When an author and a ghostwriter genuinely enjoy the process, something unexpected happens during interview sessions. The author lowers their guard. They stop speaking in talking points and start sharing the unvarnished truth, the messy backstories, and the subtle nuances that make a manuscript unputdownable.
That level of vulnerability requires deep personal rapport. If we are going to spend twelve months in the trenches together building a legacy project, mutual respect and genuine liking aren’t luxuries — they are operational prerequisites.
It’s a matter of specialization and limitation. Most authors I work with have or had dynamic careers doing what they love and are masters in their area of life. They have families, and whether or not their kids are grown, they don’t have time to write the book themselves, or they don’t want to trust themselves with the process.
People who specialize in one area of operations tend to know the spheres of discipline where they don’t excel. Others can do everything that time affords them.
Clients who seek a professional ghostwriter aren’t looking for a shortcut; they’re making a sharp decision to perfect their vision. If a successful founder or a seasoned executive wants to build a house, they don’t spend three years learning how to pour concrete and frame timber — they hire an architect.
Writing a book applies the same logic. Book construction is planning, drafting, revision, and proofreading. It requires structural mapping, pacing, voice capture, line polishing; hundreds of hours of focused concentration.
My clients recognize that their highest-value contribution is their lived experience, their hard-won knowledge, and their unique voice. My highest-value contribution is turning those raw elements into a narrative arc. By recognizing their own operational limits regarding time and execution, they delegate the heavy lifting of the manuscript to a specialist who lives and breathes book architecture every day.
Writing is my job, and I love what I do. I collaborate with people to turn their book ideas into books.
When I wrote fiction, I was limited to the contents of my own imagination. As a ghostwriter, every new project opens the door to a completely different universe. In a single decade, I can step inside the mind of an artist, a surgeon, a philanthropist, or an entrepreneur. I get to sit across the table from people who have reshaped industries or survived extraordinary personal transformations, ask them deep questions for months, and absorb how they see the world.
There is an incredible freedom in stepping behind the curtain. When you remove your own ego from the equation, you stop worrying about how you look on the page and focus entirely on making the author shine. Capturing someone else’s rhythm, vocabulary, and worldview so accurately that their readers love it, and those, if any, who know they had a ghostwriter say: “This is you” — is among the most gratifying creative achievements I know.
I don’t miss the solitary pursuit of fiction. I have found something personally fulfilling: taking raw human experience, structuring it with care, insight, and skill, to help exceptional people put their ideas through their pen onto the page.