Ghostwriting ≠ Transcribing

What emotionless writing feels like.

While working with a client earlier this week to help improve/fix a manuscript that was written by another ghostwriter, one big problem became clear. The manuscript is written as if the ghostwriter did nothing more than create a very clean transcript of their interviews.

If the author didn’t say why something made him emotional or describe the emotion and how he exhibited and experienced it, the ghostwriter just wrote something akin to, I felt emotional.

This is terrible.

First, it breaks the writer’s maxim of show don’t tell, and does so in rather spectacular fashion. Telling is: I felt angry. Less than telling is: I felt an emotion (you, the reader, pick which one based on available evidence).

Showing: I stabbed my finger in his chest as I yelled, “Get down off your damn cross! We need the wood!”

Ergo, in this instance the ghostwriter completely failed the client by engaging in a creative process that was neither creative nor a process. As a ghostwriter, we need to ask follow up questions and always be seeking for the deeper truth, the truer emotion, and how the client experienced it. What did they see, taste, feel, smell, and so on. How can we better understand the experience of the client and then present it in a way that connects the reader’s sense of empathy to the character on the page.

This is where reading ends and experiencing another person’s mental/emotional state begins. It is, as Mark Twain said, the difference between a lightening bug and lightening.

Second, all the ghostwriter is doing is acting as a high priced transcriptionist. They are failing their client and ultimately themselves. If you write shit, people won’t race to work with you and your books will fail.

And ultimately, it means you’re damn lazy. Do the work and do your homework. If you have intergenerational trauma as a theme, you should understand what that is, how it presents in children and adults, how it affects lives, etc. And you should be familiar with concepts such as weathering and allostatic load (if you just had to look these up…well…okay, but if you are a writer, you should already know what these are).

So, how do you avoid being a fancy, high priced transcriptionist? Develop an interviewing theory that helps you get the client into a state where they can access deeper memory and then push them to associate meaning to those memories as well as understand the impact of those memories on their psyche. Dig for the emotion and dig for the drama and tension.

And avoid cliché like the plague. This is the death of storytelling and writing.