3 Useful Ghostwriting Questions: Why, Who, What

From my earliest days in journalism, I was taught to ask questions that begin with who, what, where, when, how, and why because they were open-ended and would lead to long answers (and better quotes).

When I transitioned into ghostwriting, I found these questions still worked, but I recently learned that there is a better order in asking them. I had been starting with What is the story? But I should have been asking two other questions first.

A 78-year-old woman in the Boston area wanted me to ghostwrite her story. “I want to tell the story about my life,” she said.

“OK, what parts?” I asked.

“All of it,” she replied.

I proceeded to explain to her that no one’s entire life is interesting enough (for proof, watch the movie “Boyhood”), and that people’s attention spans are getting shorter so writing something as long as War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1,225 pages) or In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (4,215 pages) isn’t a good idea.

Everybody has certain parts of their life that are interesting, compelling, and worth telling, I said to her, so what parts are those?

“Well, I thought I’d do a chapter on my family life,” she said. “I had great parents.”

Again, I didn’t think that was going to make for interesting reading. I suggested she think about the moments, incidents, experiences, knowledge, or wisdom she wanted to impart on her readers. She said she’d think about it and thanked me.

I thought the entire conversation was funny. How does one not know what the interesting, unique, unusual, amazing, and wonderful aspects of their life story are? I thought.

I told my business adviser this story. He had a different take on things.

“You can’t evaluate the what until you know the why and the who,” he said. The first question he said I should ask is Why do you want to write this story? The second question should be Who is the audience?

“Before you can start analyzing if (the story is) worth telling, you need to know the why and the who,” he said. “These provide context.”

He gave hypothetical examples. What if the woman’s parents were elderly and she had never told them how much they meant to her? What if she wanted her present and future grandchildren to know everything about her life?

Within each hypothetical were the why and who. The woman would obviously be motivated to tell some family members every last detail about her. It wouldn’t make any bestseller list and probably would never be published, but that wouldn’t be her goal.

Then my adviser explained the problem with asking the what first: A ghostwriter tends to make assumptions based on some imaginary audience who would evaluate the story on some literary level. “Sometimes, that works,” he said, “but sometimes that’s not what it’s about.”

He helped me see that I already knew this: Cindy White wanted to tell her story because she had been screwed over and wanted others (her audience) to avoid a similar fate (the why). Plus, she wanted others who married psychopaths like she did (her audience) be able to cope and see there is a way out (the why). By knowing that, I then could explore the what of her story and determine how to best craft the story that best speaks to her audience.

The next opportunity to ask why? and who? before what? will be on a Sept. 7 call with a prospect. She’s a teacher who wants to write her memoir.

If you’d like to discuss this or any other post, feel free to leave a message. Just click the Contact tab and use the provided form.