3 Steps Within the Ghostwriter’s Fine Process

The following  illustrates the ghostwriter’s process and expertise as a storyteller.

A client recently sent to his younger brothers the most recent draft of what he wanted to be the first chapter of his memoir I’m ghostwriting. It would start at the end of the story.

Both of them praised the opening story, then the journalist brother criticized the part in which my client described his practice as “a long advertisement for your work. … It needs narrative just like the rest of your story, and if you put it at the end where it belongs the narrative of how your advice relates to your owns tory will help immensely.”

The other brother was more diplomatic, writing, “There were a number of times when I felt that you were tooting your own horn while utilizing other people’s quotations about yourself.”

I had received their emails before we spoke, and I concluded that what we needed to do was put the chapter aside and go through the rest of the story. Once we’ve done that, we can go back and figure out how to begin and end the book. My rationale was that I haven’t heard the entire story yet. Our working outline calls for fourteen chapters, of which we’ve covered only four. He hasn’t told me all the whole story, so I don’t yet know the entire arc we will take.

The ghostwriter knows the best way to present a story and must, as an early part in the process, communicate to the client the best way to tell the story.

I have found there are three steps to take.

Part 1: Tell the whole story

A ghostwriter cannot determine the best way to tell the story without first knowing the entire story. If a book project takes between a year and eighteen months, the first four to six months will be spent going through everything in great detail.

It really doesn’t matter how the client communicates the whole story to the ghostwriter. I’ve experienced three different ways: chronologically, jumping around, and end first.

My first ghostwriting client—the Philadelphia schoolteacher who suffered a mysterious heart ailment one May, fell into a 16-day coma, and recovered in time to start school in September—told the the story in complete chronological order: before hospitalization, including nuclear and extended family; while in the hospital, his recovery, and the aftermath.

A current client jumped all over the place in telling me the entire story. He started as a five year old, then jumped to his parents before he was born, then how his brother was bullied in third grade, how he learned to fight, then a jump to his being bullied in third grade followed by one moment in fourth grade to eight years later, then a few years backward, then some more early childhood stuff, then five years forward, then many years ahead to his work as an adult, then back to when his brother was a juvenile delinquent with a criminal record, and so on.

This took six months, but I knew the whole story and then was able to complete the outline.

The client I started this post with wanted to begin at the end. That’s a common storytelling technique, so I went with it.

In this part of the process, the bottom line is the ghostwriter should let the client—the story expert—tell the whole story any which way the client wants.

Part 2: Construct the narrative

This is the part of the process where the ghostwriter should begin to assert his/her/their expertise in determining the best way to tell the story.

The complete chronology is rarely the way to go. In fact, I have never told a story from beginning to end. I usually find a place somewhere in the story to open with and then go back and tell the story chronologically.

In the case of my Philadelphia schoolteacher, I thought the best place to begin was him waking up from his coma. He had vividly described what it was like, and it was nothing like the way it’s presented in movies and on TV.

In the case of my client who married a psychopath, I opened on the day she had been served with papers indicating the state was coming after her for the $1.4 million her ex-husband had stolen.

The client who jumped all over the place knew where he wanted to start, and he was right: He witnessed a guy getting shot in a drive-by right in front of him when he was five years old. I couldn’t find anything better.

I have an idea of where to start with my current client: at the end when the Palisades Fire destroyed his home. But I’m not yet sure where to go next, and I won’t know until we go back and tell the entire story.

So far, we have covered his prep school, college, and first years post-college riding a motorcycle across Europe and Asia, and making movies in the Philippines. Now, we’re going back to his early years before later jumping ahead to his Hollywood days, his Big Sur and “mountain man” era, his dalliance with a music career, his becoming a government bureaucrat, his private practice, and COVID. He wanted to start post-COVID; we’ll see if that’s where we end.

He’s toying with the idea of leaving out his practice entirely. I told him to reconsider, that there is a way to include it. He’s open to it. As the process continues, I’m confident he will be convinced.

Part 3: Edit

The final step in the process occurs once the narrative is constructed and the entire manuscript written. The two sides need to go over everything. The client will have ideas and give feedback; the ghostwriter must take it into account. If what the client says has merit, the ghostwriter should make the change, since it’s the client’s book. If the client’s idea takes away from the dramatic impact of the story or makes the story less compelling, the ghostwriter must speak up and try to convince the client that the change would be counterproductive.

One client rejected my suggested starting point and instead wanted to tell the story chronologically. I was unable to convince her otherwise and made the change. Then she sent it to a publisher, who told her that the opening was weak.

After submitting a first draft, my client who jumped all over the place gave me feedback that made me realize that we had deviated too far from the main story, so we reconstructed the outline and streamlined the story so we focused on the two brothers and how their choices led them on the paths they traveled.

 Conclusion

A problem many ghostwriters have is the tendency to overestimate the client’s knowledge of the process. Because the ghostwriter has done this over and over again, he/she/they might assume some of this process is obvious. It’s not. The ghostwriter must balance how to explain the process in easy-to-understand terms without overwhelming the client with too much detail.

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