6 Great Tips for Human Ghostwriters

As a member of the human ghostwriters club, I have had numerous clients who insisted on particular stories in their manuscript. In one case, it was memory after memory about his mother. In another, it was a fishing trip gone to hell. In a third, it was numerous sailboat trips around the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic.

There might be human ghostwriters out there who would simply transcribe the stories into the main narrative. I pushed back.

In the first instance, the memories about the mother became too repetitive and told the same story about his mother’s character: She loved, cared, supported him, and told him how he was destined for greatness. We didn’t need five of them.

The fishing trip had nothing to do with the story of two brothers growing up in the Bronx and choosing either to join the gang or not. It also brought in familial characters who had little to do with the central story of a protagonist (the gang banging brother), the narrator (the older brother) and the antagonist (the South Bronx itself).

The boat trips were presented as a travel guide. The problem was twofold. First, the travels ended in 1979, so the locales had undoubtedly changed. Second, they had nothing to do with the compelling story of how an engineer invented better hearing aids and changed the world for the better.

Each case illustrated how human ghostwriters can (and should) challenge a client’s notions instead of just acting as a transcription machine. Pushing back is something a human does that AI doesn’t do, and it’s one of the many ways I’m going to list how a ghostwriter can combat AI slop and provide a client real value. This is a continuation of last week’s post. Read it here. 

AI almost always validates what the user wants. Human ghostwriters can question the motives: “Are you sure? That story doesn’t feel honest.” “You’re skipping the emotional consequence.” “Why do you sound so defensive?” “Are you aware this contradicts what you previously said or did?” “How does this story improve the narrative?”

Pushing the client to go deeper and think more often leads to a breakthrough that dramatically improves memoir ghostwriting or thought leadership book.

Here are six more ways human ghostwriters can fight back against AI slop:

1. Answer the deeper questions. AI slop is prolific and seemingly endless, so human ghostwriters should distinguish quality from crap. That comes from the outline. While AI can create outlines, the best ghostwriters go further and identify the deeper, underlying question that the book attempts to answer.

For example: Say you’re a CEO who backstabbed, stepped on, and manipulated anyone in your way to reach the executive suite (and the corner office that goes with it). Now that you’re there, what were the costs you paid to get there, and what repercussions and consequences did your methods get you?

Another: You started a hedge fund that invested in Big Oil, but you woke up one day and decided you wanted to help the environment. You claimed you were a “change agent,” so what did your reinvention and evolution require?

Human ghostwriters can always reach deeper into a human’s motivations than AI.

2. Avoid motivational cliches like the plague. Many people want to tell their stories because they believe in their tales’ inspiring qualities and want to motivate their readers. AI defaults to motivational cliches such as “no pain, no gain,” “believe in yourself,” “follow your dreams,” and “think outside the box” because they’re so common. But a human ghostwriter can force a client to get specific.

Human ghostwriters can say, “Instead of saying, ‘I learned resilience,’ how about showing the moment you were tested and came though it? Instead of pointing out how ‘Family matters most,’ why not detail the exact sacrifice you saw a family member make that showed you how true that is? Then maybe you can show how you proved it, too.”

3. Take emotional risks. AI writing has a rhythm and pattern to it, and part of that is that it’s often emotionally safe. The most memorable moments in books often are the parts where the author confesses something that he/she either kept secret for years or didn’t want to admit to. A ghostwriter can help a client openly discuss moments of vulnerability, embarrassment, regret, jealousy, pettiness, obnoxiousness, and fear.

The same holds true with anything morally ambiguous. In Oliver Twist, Nancy is a prostitute and criminal, but she also risks her life to protect a child. My Bronx client killed a lot of people growing up, but he also rescued a lady from a burning building.

These types of risks create humanity, something AI isn’t and can’t be.

4. Play with the story structure. AI prefers conventional structures because it’s the most common, so AI likes to tie up all the loose ends. A human can include unresolved tensions and leave characters hanging, unsure of what will happen next.

Human ghostwriters also can experiment with nonlinear timelines, recurring nightmares, intertwined threads, switching narrators between chapters, and thematic callbacks.

One of my favorite examples is “Pulp Fiction.” Quentin Tarantino jumps around in time. Upon closer examination, there are exactly seven jumps. Imagine if that movie was told chronologically. It would start with Captain Koons explaining the gold watch to young Butch, the it would tell everyone else’s story before retiring to Butch.

It would be a completely different movie, and not nearly as good. Tarantino’s original structure signaled his intentional artistry.

5. Interpret, don’t write. Since AI now can string together words to form coherent sentences (even if it’s all flat and boring), it’s up to the human ghostwriter to go deeper and interpret the true meaning of the client’s stories. That means identifying patterns the client can’t see.

That makes a ghostwriter’s role partly psychological. Why does the client continue to chase the same body type, the same unavailable man/woman, the same occupation? Answer that, put it into the book, and now the client has a story that’s deeper and more probing than anything AI can do.

6. Make it impossible to be written by AI. The best defense against AI slop is to be specific and precise. The more unusual the memories, the more idiosyncratic the phrasing, the more nuance, the more uncertainty and inconsistency, and the more learned insight, the more readers will feel like this story involves real people, and that there’s a real consciousness behind the words on the page.

I’m aware that AI is pushing me (and other ghostwriters) to write with even more humanity, but that’s not bad. It will make ghostwriters more valuable and more in demand.

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