When 2 Great Voices Mix Up

When it comes to voice, most clients who hire ghostwriters know that the fundamental job of the ghostwriter is to make the reader believe he or she wrote the book. That means learning their vocabulary, word choices, slang preferences, sentence rhythms, sense of humor, opinions, storytelling methods and habits, and personality.

But what happens when the client keeps doing things that make him sound less like himself and more like AI?

I had a client take the 82,000-word manuscript he and I carefully worked on for more than a year and turn it into a bloated 115,000 words because he insisted on having me include words, passages, paragraphs, and chapters created by his using the artificial intelligence program Claude. 

What was a gritty, coarse, graphic, and violent story about the choices people make became more sanitized, gentle, tame, and family-friendly. The sex, language, and violence that remained had become sterilized by thousands of unnecessary words and didn’t sound anything like the client.

It was full of “it’s not X it’s Y” statements. The chapters tied up way too neatly, which is not how real life works. There’s a lot of telling, rather than showing, what the client felt.

I asked him if he knew what he wanted. He said yes. I told him I was concerned that he was diluting his story and his voice. He sounded unconcerned.

And here lies an important distinction. Clients often want to sound a certain way, but that’s not necessarily how they actually sound.

This client sounded matter-of-factly as he recounted violent moments from his life on the streets. He dropped F-bombs like he had an endless supply of them. But when we were finished, his final manuscript had more manufactured drama than the earlier drafts.

It was as if he was telling me, “I want to sound intelligent” instead of sounding like he was from the streets. He thought cleaning up the language, such as not speaking in the vernacular (e.g. gotta) and using the actual correct English words (got to) would make him sound smarter to his audience.

But his audience is people who were or are from the streets. They would recognize the grittiness, coarseness, vulgarity, sex, violence, crime, and language.

If you hire a ghostwriter who only writes what you want, you’ll get an inauthentic book. The key is to find the authentic voice underneath the one you think you should have.

Here are five ways you might be subverting your voice:

1. You try to sound smarter. My client is an orthopedist, so he is smart. But his story takes place in his youth when he spoke the language of the streets. The later version has fewer F-bombs and more adjectives that take the reader out of the streets. For example, he described people on methadone: “Methadone also leaves users feeling tired, and people on it would often droop their heads down, making people think they were either on heroin or trying to suck their own dicks.”

The final draft read like this: “I often saw people outside the methadone clinics on the streets with their heads drooped down to their crotches. The street assumption was that they were high; that wasn’t always true. Methadone was meant to help people feel stable not intoxicated.”

You need to revel in your own voice and understand how your unique voice will shine through and increase your credibility with your audience.

2. You try to sound more authoritative. Some clients want to eliminate uncertainty, humor, vulnerability, or conversational language. My client used AI to sound less street-smart and more complex. A sentence that originally appeared as “I could hear the goh/doh of the conga drums beating out the rhythm of the city” (what he actually told me in an interview) became “The goh goh doh of the conga drums underneath everything became like a second heartbeat that didn’t belong to any one person but to the whole block at once.”

Instead of sounding authoritative, it sounds ridiculous.

3. You imitate other writing. Instead of sounding like yourself, you want to sound like a particular author or a style. My client chose Claude, so “Then I heard one single loud gunshot” turned into “One crack. Single and sharp and so loud it rearranged the air around it.”

A series of words that anyone could have said now sounded like Cormac McCarthy.

4. You rewrite the ghostwriter’s work. What I mean here is that after spending time getting your voice down pat, you replace it with something else.

In the manuscript, the client’s brother picked up a young woman who was considering a life of prostitution. In the original drafts, the client acted as macho as any young man would have at the time. They had sex, the woman wanted him to be her pimp, and he rejected that, suggesting instead to get off the street and live a different life. 

In the later drafts, he suddenly feels more love for her.

5. You become self-conscious. When you talk, you might not realize how you sound. When you read it, you sometimes don’t like what you read because you don’t like how you sound, even when the ghostwriter accurately captures you.

So you change things because you want to sound how you imagine, not how you really do. My client eliminated some foul language, softened the violence, and muted the sex, resulting in a manuscript that makes the real people seem less authentic.

This is the trap you can fall into: telling the ghostwriter, “Make me sound like me, but not like that.”

Here’s another problem: You have final say, so you can veto anything the ghostwriter suggests, and the ghostwriter has to acquiesce. But by not listening to the ghostwriter’s advice, the manuscript sounds like two different people.

In my clients case, the AI remained in his manuscript, making the voice and tone inconsistent throughout. Readers will immediately notice that.

Don’t let self-consciousness sabotage your voice.

Here’s what to expect from a strong ghostwriter:

1. He’ll examine the evidence. If he doesn’t already have them he will ask for interview recordings, transcripts, emails, writings, speeches, social media posts, etc. to research. That way, he can determine how you actually communicate instead of how you want to communicate. If you skip this step, that’s a problem.

2. He’ll read the passage aloud to you. Then he’ll ask, “Would you actually say this to another person?” If you say no, that’s the whole point. Then you can collaborate on the rewrite.

3. He’ll read two versions aloud to you. One will be the natural, authentic voice, the other the preferred but less authentic voice. If you’re torn between how you want to sound and how you actually sound, hearing two versions will immediately tell you which one is you.

In the end, the most valuable thing a ghostwriter can do for you is show you that the person you want to sound like isn’t always the person your audience needs to hear.

The best ghostwriting makes you sound like yourself, which will automatically make your story the most compelling, honest, and authentic story it can be.

If you’re thinking about writing a book and want to work with an experienced ghostwriter in Los Angeles, 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.