4 Great Ways Empathy’s Important

Here is a story about empathy. My client was having a rough time talking to me. Reliving all the pain and embarrassment of not realizing what her friends and children easily could tell about her boyfriend (he was a big phony) caused her to stop our conversation and break down in tears.

I paused. “Are you feeling too much?” I asked.

After several sobs, she replied, “Yes. I don’t think I can continue today.”

“That’s okay,” I said softly. “Let’s reschedule.”

Sometimes, a ghostwriter has to realize that a client is struggling and feeling vulnerable and needs a break. Clients won’t share their messiest, deepest, darkest, most difficult material if they don’t trust the person they’re working with.

This exemplifies a trait I think clients should seek in a ghostwriter: empathy.

Empathy, or the power of understanding and imaginatively entering into another person’s feelings, is one of the most important and often overlooked qualities a ghostwriter can possess. A ghostwriter doesn’t merely write down what a client says. The ghostwriter is trying to understand another person’s experience well enough to represent it accurately and authentically.

Empathy helps a ghostwriter really understand a client beyond the story, and since a lot of ghostwriting projects are emotionally loaded, a client recognizing the ghostwriter has empathy will go a long way toward a fruitful and successful relationship and manuscript.

Here are four ways empathy contributes to a ghostwriter’s success, and why clients should look for empathy in ghostwriters.

1. Empathy helps the ghostwriter connect with the client’s humanity. Most people don’t tell their stories in a chronological, linear way. They skip around, leave things out, minimize painful experiences, exaggerate their positive moments, and struggle to find insights that explain why they do, think, and feel like they do.

A client with an empathetic ghostwriter will feel like he or she is being listened to and really heard. The client will get a sense that the ghostwriter really understands what the story or experience means to the client. 

My client really hurt when her boyfriend-turned-husband took advantage of her by lying about who he was doing business with when he was really twelve miles away shacking up with his girlfriend. I was able to let her re-experience that without interfering, and I gave her the sense that she was safe to return there.

Moments like that turn an accurate book into an emotionally compelling one.

2. Empathy helps uncover what isn’t said. Sometimes an ordinary statement really is a door to deeper understanding. If a client says, “I wasn’t particularly close to my father,” the ghostwriter may recognize there’s something more to that sentence and start asking more probing questions: Why? What made you distant? When did you first realize it? What did you want from your father that you didn’t get? How did that affect your relationships later?

Clients who have never worked with a ghostwriter might think it invasive to ask such questions. In reality, the goal isn’t to pry but to recognize that I wasn’t particularly close to my father doesn’t fully explain the client’s experience. An empathetic ghostwriter helps bring out deeper truths.

I had a client with a heart ailment and was in a coma. The underlying truth was that he would have died had his wife not refused to pull the plug. We talked at great length about how he felt before, during, and after his coma, but none of that happens if his wife doesn’t play the hero. Empathy helped me when I interviewed the wife to get her side of the story. She really wasn’t comfortable doing it, and I had to show understanding while convincing her how important her role really was.

3. Empathy allows for exploring difficult subjects without exploiting them. Clients who have a memoir in them might discuss a wide variety of uncomfortable topics, including but not limited to death, divorce, bankruptcy, addiction, betrayal, failure, abuse, regrets, and criminal behavior. They need a ghostwriter with enough empathy to understand the emotional weight of those moments while staying objective enough to write effectively.

The client needs to feel that the ghostwriter is thinking, “This person understands why this matters to me” and not “This will make a great chapter.”

Take my client with the bad boyfriend/husband. She made it very clear to me that it was important for her to endure what she did so she could come out the other side stronger and better able to help other women avoid what happened to her.

4. Empathy makes interviews better. Clients need to be ready to talk to the ghostwriter for hours and hours over a period of months, or even a year (I’ve had projects last as short as three months and as long as two years). They need a ghostwriter to understand that interviews aren’t just information-gathering sessions. They’re about creating a trusting environment so the client can remember, reflect, speculate, and admit to things they hadn’t meant to bring up.

They need a ghostwriter who knows when to ask another question, stay silent, follow the tangent, change subjects, push deeper, and stop pushing. 

I have a client who got very sick and was unable to work for two months. At the time, he had eight stories covering about thirty years and totaling 15,000 words for him to review. When he finally was able to continue, he had no desire to go through all of that and instead wanted to tell more stories that befit his sour mood. I had been pushing him to review, but I realized that wasn’t right for him, so I put those stories aside and let him tell me more.

Empathy doesn’t mean the ghostwriter feels or experiences everything the client went through. It means the ghostwriter understands what and why the client feels, and how that shaped them into the people who now tell the story for the ghostwriter.

Prospects who work with an empathetic ghostwriter will come to see the difference between writing about a life and writing from inside the life.

Which is what the client is paying the ghostwriter to do. As I previously said, the client needs to feel that the ghostwriter is thinking, “This person understands why this matters to me” and not “This will make a great chapter— which is what a client should be looking for in a ghostwriter.

If you’re thinking about a book and want to talk through whether we’d be a good fit, take a look at some of my other posts on ghostwriting at https://leebarnathan.com/blog/ or reach out directly to set up a conversation.