1 Story Expert + 1 Storytelling Expert = Gold

When people contact me to ghostwrite their book, they sometimes tell me, “We don’t know how to do it. We need you to show us how.”

Fair enough. One of the first things I tell them once they become a client is that the process is like a relationship, and in this relationship, there are two experts: the story expert and the storytelling expert. It is very important that both sides remember that.

The client is the story expert. After all, it is the client that brings the compelling story to the ghostwriter. The ghostwriter, meanwhile, is the storytelling expert, who knows how to present the compelling story in the most effective way to reach the client’s target audience and achieve the client’s goals for the project.

Each side should understand where their expertise lies, and where it doesn’t. The client and ghostwriter alike can ask questions and make suggestions related to the other’s expertise, but neither side should try to pull rank and step on the other’s toes by insisting their way is the right way when their way isn’t the expert way.

Here are five places in which both sides are the expert.

1. Choosing what to include—and what to leave out. I liken this to a movie. If you watch the DVD special features, there are always scenes filmed that are just so good but just don’t fit, and the director and editor are very sad that they have to cut them for the reasons they do.

The same applies to the story. A client might want to include everything because it’s so important to the client. Yet the ghostwriter knows how to select and shape material so the story stays focused, clear, and engaging to readers who weren’t there.

One client told me a great story about a fishing trip gone awry. It was funny, scary, emotional—and it did not fit with the narrative of two brothers taking different paths in inner city New York. We had to cut it.

2. Structuring the narrative. The client knows the events that happened. He/she knows the key moments, the emotions, the challenges, the twists and turns, the wins and losses, the conclusions, and the aftermaths. 

Whether it’s awakening from a coma and having to relearn how to walk and eat, discovering you’re married to a psychopath, learning how difficult the system makes it to help foster kids, figuring out how to market doing a global pandemic, or escaping the Bronx street life—and these are all stories clients have brought to me to work on—it’s the client that has the lived experience, insight, knowledge, and perspective. The client’s the expert. The ghostwriter can’t possibly do the job without this information.

Similarly, the client might have an idea of where to begin the story, but the ghostwriter is the expert. It’s the ghostwriter that determines which of the seven story archetypes to use. It’s the ghostwriter that decides how to structure the events into the most compelling narrative. It’s the ghostwriter that realizes this is the beginning, this is the middle, this is the end. And it’s the ghostwriter that crafts the story so there’s tension and release, climax and resolution.

In my career, I opened the schoolteacher’s story with his awakening from the coma after sixteen days. The woman who married a psychopath wanted to open the book with her discovering her husband was a fraud, that he wasn’t trading in Oklahoma but instead was in Arizona shacking up with his girlfriend. Compelling, yes, but also a bit cliche. Since the state of Arizona came after her for the money he stole, I suggested we start with her being served papers.

For the foster-kids story, I found the most harrowing and incendiary story my clients gave me and led with that under the headline “It Happens More Often Than You’d Think.” Since the global pandemic was so fresh, the client and I agreed that we begin with an overview of what COVID wrought, which was the name of the chapter, too.

For the Bronx tale, my client actually suggested the story we start with: five-year-old him witnessing a man being shot in the streets. This was a case of the client being right, but that’s okay because it’s my job as a ghostwriter to know when somebody else has the best idea.

3. Bringing out theme and meaning. The client has lived the story in full, and he/she might have an idea of what the themes are. But the ghostwriter has the expertise to further identify and weave those themes to give the story resonance and universal appeal.

One current client is having me tell his hero’s-journey story. In it, he desired to be big, important, great, significant; and he tried to achieve that greatness in a wide variety of ways before realizing in his eighties that he achieved it in his own unique way.

Recently, I met with him to go over a chapter from early in his childhood. He said I had missed the mark and he was going to take a stab at it. What he sent me was a lot of background about his mother and father, but he left out a critical piece: the impetus for his embarking on his quest for greatness.

I told him that we have to include the reason he wanted to be great and show how that caused him to go on his lifelong search for significance. It turned out that it wasn’t his parents but his family tree that set him off. So, I rewrote the chapter’s opening, included the pertinent details about his parents he gave me, and we were off. 

4. Creating emotional impact. The client remembers what happened and how he/she felt when it happened. The ghostwriter knows how to translate those feelings into scenes, dialogue, and pacing that evoke emotion in the reader.

Imagine waking up from a coma. How difficult is it to regain your bearings? My schoolteacher client drifted in an out of consciousness. He thought he was at his friend’s house, then he was at a baseball stadium that moved like a Transformer. Then he became aware of the hospital light and the machines he was connected to. Then he felt drunk. Then he had three feet, and he couldn’t move any of them.

What reaction did you have to that?

Imagine finding out your husband was cheating on you by seeing a phone bill with one unfamiliar number on it over and over, then calling it and speaking to a woman who calls herself his girlfriend. How shocked would you be?

5. Finding the client’s voice. A client expertly speaks in his/her own voice (it’s the only one he/she knows, right?) but struggles to express it clearly in writing. The ghostwriter expertly adopts and refines the client’s voice so it sounds authentic, consistent, and readable on the page.

One of my favorite moments was when a client read what I had written. She started crying because I had captured her and her story. What I had written sounded like her. It was as if she had written it herself.

That’s what two experts can bring to a ghostwriting project.

Feel free to read and check out my other posts related to ghostwriting. Go to leebarnathan.com/blog.