6 More Ways Empathy’s Great

Last week, I wrote about how empathy is a quality clients should demand ghostwriters have.  Read it here. I mentioned four ways, but there are six more.

1. Empathy helps preserve the client’s voice. I’ve previously written and told people that sounding like the client is the most important skill a ghostwriter can have. As a former journalist (with a journalism degree), I took pride in quoting people accurately. That is the first step clients should expect from a ghostwriter: that when they read drafts, they recognize their own words.

However, voice is more than just vocabulary. To sound like a client, a professional ghostwriter needs to understand why the client speaks the way they do. Empathy helps the writer get there.

I had a client who, as a therapist, “invited” people to consider a different way to look at their lives. And he often used the same terminology with me. “I invite you to imagine you were living on the Sunset Strip at the height of the Hippie movement,” he said. Another time, he said, “I invite you to hear the sound of the gong, to bask in the glory of the sound bath, to breathe in deep my frustration at being turned away.”

At first, his style seemed a bit phony to me, But in going through his life story, I realized that he had witnessed many counterculture aspects that would have caused him to consider the terminology. Additionally, he had a Zen meditation background, which also contributed. As a result, I left it alone and didn’t change it in the manuscript.

2. Empathy makes the writing more human. This goes beyond sounding like the client. This is about emotion and the feelings that accompany the story.

Readers respond to emotion, and a client should hire a ghostwriter who understands the client’s emotional experiences can translate into facts that readers feel. For example, a client told me, “All my life, I had a sense that I must become someone important.” That could have so many meanings, so I had to ask a couple of key questions to understand what that really meant for him: “Somewhere in my early youth, I picked up on the notion that it was my destiny. I only had to look at my family to understand why.”

He then explained his family included governors and framers of early American government: two Declaration of Independence signers and the man who wrote the Constitution’s preamble.

When I heard that, I was astounded. I suddenly knew why he felt such a desire. The reader would, too.

3. Empathy helps keep the ghostwriter’s judgment at bay. As clients tell their stories, they inevitably will do, think, and say things the ghostwriter knows were to their detriment and would never do it. For example, my client didn’t know she had married a psychopath, but the clues were there, and I would have been able to spot them, too.

What’s important here is that the empathetic ghostwriter can’t act judgmental. Otherwise, the client might clam up, stop being completely honest, and not give the ghostwriter the access to the information that would make the manuscript its most compelling.

Therefore, a client needs to see a ghostwriter say, “I would not have made that choice, but I want to understand why you did.” And my client obliged: Her mother had died tragically, and she was in a vulnerable state when she met the psychopath six months later. Without her mother’s death, she’s not in the condition she was. When she brought that up, everything made sense to me.

Understanding the motivations is a valuable ghostwriting skill clients need to see.

4. Empathy helps determine the real story. Prospects often tell me, “I have a story I’ve got to tell. I think it would make a great book. I want to inspire people.”

That’s nice, but it’s also vague. As a book editor in Philadelphia I need to help the person figure out what the book is really about. That means I have to listen for motivations that the prospect might not have yet realized.

The best example from my career is the Bronx Brothers who came to me wanting to write a “Wonder Years” type of memoir about their lives in the South Bronx. Within that large group of episodes, anecdotes, stories, and events, I realized the real story was about these two brothers who chose to either join the gangs or not, and what happened as a result. I identified one brother as the narrator, the other brother as the protagonist, and the neighborhood as the antagonist.

Empathy helped reveal the underlying story.

5. Empathy helps to push and back off. A good ghostwriter in Philadelphia has to sometimes challenge a client: “I need you to finish looking at the first draft by (date).” But there’s a difference between challenging someone proactively and pushing someone past their emotional limits.

I have a client who aspirated on the operating table, causing severe throat damage that made him unable to work for two months. I had sent him a first draft of eight stories that I was awaiting feedback when he took sick. When he returned, he could only talk for an hour at a time, so I pushed him to edit those stories so we could move on.

“I’m in such a state that I don’t want to do that,” he said. “I know I have to, and I will, but all I want to do is tell you more stories. That’s all I feel like doing.”

It became clear to me that he wasn’t ready to give feedback, so I backed off and let him tell more stories.

Empathy gives the ghostwriter a better sense of boundaries.

6. Empathy builds trust. I leave this for the end because all the other ways empathy plays a role are related to this one. Ghostwriting can be extremely intimate. Clients are sharing their most private thoughts, feelings, opinions, behaviors, actions, and consequences. They need to feel safe telling the ghostwriter the information, and they have to trust that the ghostwriter will not use the information in an inappropriate way, betray the client in any way, or judge the client for it.

It’s why I say ghostwriting sometimes resembles a marriage, or at the very least an emotional relationship. Those types of connections lead to levels of disclosure that don’t happen simply because the client and ghostwriter signed a contract.

It happens because the client believes the ghostwriter will handle the material with all the care, sensitivity, and tact it deserves. The client ends up saying, “This person won’t misunderstand me, judge me, or misuse what I’m telling them.”

Empathy helps create that trust.

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.