“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
—Sylvia Plath
The essence of ghostwriting excellence is for the ghostwriter to “become” the author precisely the way an Oscar-winning actor becomes the role. As a ghostwriter I strive to think in my author’s head, to feel in the author’s heart, to speak in the author’s tongue, and to write with the author’s hand. Whether your desire is to write a brutally true memoir based strictly and exclusively on your personal experience but firmly grounded on verifiable known and documentable historical facts, or a fictionalized account of your story in the intriguing, potentially whimsical free-form of a nonfiction novel, or even a work of pure fiction by way of the more traditional novel, my goal is to become your voice and spirit, not to alter them—to make absolutely sure it is your passion that appears on the page, in words that capture your unique perspective of events and their meanings; the feeling they evoke in you as the author. Your prose will be enhanced through a rich contextual background of emotional and visual imagery, and if appropriate, historically accurate detail that will make your readers “feel” as well as read the story. You provide the solo, I’ll provide the orchestra.
I think I am a little different from other professional ghostwriters in that I do not always follow or rely on the same formulaic process, though of course I do very often employ some of the time-tested techniques, such as recording interviews and creating transcripts that are then forged and refined into the draft manuscript. However, I believe every book is different; moreover every author’s desires, goals, and needs are different. Therefore, I prefer to offer a “process” that is uniquely customized to the comfort and convenience of the author as well as to the nature of the project itself. I have found that many of my clients are often extremely busy, such that my ability to offer flexibility with respect to variables like author availability and task scheduling or management may go a long way toward accommodating a busy corporate CEO or an author who must travel regularly.
In addition, I am particularly adept at working from multiple sources: interviews with you and perhaps other people relevant to your story; documents, memoranda, newspaper and magazine articles, photographs, awards and certificates of merit all serve to tell a part of your story, and all of this information can be invaluable in terms of providing an enrichment of detail that will help us collaboratively to paint a vivid picture in print.
My larger goal on the process side is to make the enterprise of writing your book as enjoyable and personally satisfying as possible for you, while at the same time making exhaustive use of all of the extant data and resources that may be availed: I am the one who does the heavy lifting for you.
One more thing that I would like you to understand about me is that I am deeply passionate about writing and I fall in love with expertly well-crafted prose. I am someone who upon encountering in some truly gifted author’s prose a magnificently poetic and eloquent sentence or paragraph, will go back and read it a second or third time and say, Oh, that is so good! I am someone who goes back to reread great passages written by my favorite authors—or the powerful and poignant endings of great books that live a life of their own in my memory. That is the standard of literary brilliance to which I aspire. It is important for you as the author to understand that I realize, first and foremost, that your book is your baby, but I will endeavor to write it with all the care and devotion to editorial excellence as if it were my own.
