I Wrote 200K+ Words Under Other People's Names. Here's What I Learned
“An insult like that must have wrecked your self-esteem,” I said.
“Not as much as you’d think,” replied the client. “If anything, it was a sign that I had to pack my bags and get the hell out of my job as soon as possible.”
I’m not a therapist. I’m a writer—a ghostwriter, to be specific. For the uninitiated, the term “ghostwriter” might remind you of the time Meek Mill put Drake on blast for paying ghostwriters to pen his songs. Spoiler alert: My job doesn’t offer anything close to that level of drama. But it makes for a great conversation starter.
About five years ago, I started writing my friends’ college essays for beer money. That was before I figured out it was possible to make a living by writing—something I genuinely enjoyed—and just putting someone else’s name on my work.
Since then, I’ve ghostwritten two books, one for the founder of an Inc. 5000 business. I’ve been the voice of a former Google manager, a Shark Tank winner, and a shady Ukranian “marketer.” I have digital footprints at TechCrunch, Vogue, Entrepreneur, and Fast Company (unbeknownst to them, for obvious reasons).
I’ve learned countless lessons about this hyper-specific niche—nearly all of them the hard way. What follows are the most important ones, which are equally applicable to articles, books, and even tweets.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been asked, “Doesn’t it bother you that other people take credit for your writing?” If I received nothing in exchange, I certainly would. But as Don Draper said, “That’s what the money's for.”
Most doers can’t double as chroniclers. Their brains are oozing with ideas and stories, but in order to put them on paper effectively, they need two things: time and a knack for the written word. Most of my clients are lucky to have one of those. Accordingly, they’re willing to pay someone to translate their thoughts into prose. That’s a far cry from copying and pasting.
“Even if manic achievers possess the patience and craftsmanship to pen their own stories, I’d wager that 99% of all celebrity, business, and political works are ghostwritten for the simple economic reality that these people’s time is better spent doing their regular work,” says ghostwriter Dean Zatkowsky.
Plagiarism is the act of stealing someone else’s work (without their permission) and passing it off as their own. Ghostwriting involves contracts, non-disclosure agreements, and most importantly, money.
Feel better? Good. But you can’t just sit down and start typing.
The crux of ghostwriting is gathering enough raw material so that you can cull down to a working draft. The best way to accomplish that is through interviews. I’m not a journalist by any stretch of the imagination, but these four tips have helped me extract hundreds of thousands of valuable words out of clients.
Start with a conversation that has no agenda
Before diving into specific questions, I want to nail down the concept of the piece and establish rapport. That usually entails meeting for drinks with no recording devices and no agenda.
“By talking with them for awhile about life and work and letting the conversation meander, you get a sense for the ideas a client comes back to over and over again,” says celebrity ghostwriter Nils Parker. “Once those threads start to reveal themselves, that’s when I start pulling.”
Forget notes—record your interviews
The first time I interviewed someone to ghostwrite their article, I showed up with a pen and a pad of paper. I tried taking notes during the conversation, but they were incoherent, not to mention the conversation was strained because I was worried I’d miss something.
Fortunately, I found Rev, an audio transcription service that costs $1 per minute. I use it every week. It’s fast, easy, and almost 100 percent accurate. One of my recent interviews was more than 10,000 words. It would have been virtually impossible to turn it into a chapter without a full-text transcription.
Prepare questions, but don’t set them in stone
I always go into interviews with prepared questions based on the topic we’ve agreed to discuss. However, if the interviewee goes on a roll, I let them roll. You never know what kind of gems you'll discover organically.
I remember one conversation when my interviewee casually mentioned an encounter she had with an executive from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Why this wasn’t mentioned in our earlier meetings remains a mystery. Nevertheless, that anecdote changed the trajectory of the piece for the better.
Stumbling upon gems is great, but you also need the discipline to pull in the reins if the conversation gets too far off track.
Don’t be afraid to be annoying
Anybody can stitch together data and information. Only artists can convey attitude, energy, and emotion. The catch is, you have to pry all of that up (unless you’re working with a gregarious personality).
Rather than settling for surface-level answers, followup with questions such as "Why?" "How does that make you feel?" and "Who cares?" These answers will add flesh and blood to the skeleton of your piece.
This prodding once made the difference between “Long term investing is valuable” and “Next time you’re tempted to delay investing, consider the financial freedom of your children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.”
One of the most common misconceptions about ghostwriting is that clients hire you for your voice. That’s never been the case in my experience. They hire me to save time and translate their voice into writing.
If you want to ghostwrite, you have to be a linguistic forger in the sense that you can sound like anybody. That’s more art than science, but these three tips should point you in the right direction.
1. Do your homework
It’s a pre-writing ritual of mine to watch and read anything my client has already produced: blog posts, talks, podcasts, etc. This helps me pick up their cadence, tone, and vocabulary. Doing this research is the difference between writing “That’s one of our core competencies” and “That’s in our wheelhouse.”
If you can’t find any existing assets, pay close attention to how they speak on the phone, or even how they write emails. Are they irreverent or eloquent? Choppy or long-winded? The more you study, the easier it is to replicate.
2. Capture idiosyncrasies
Sometimes it’s the seemingly insignificant turn of a phrase that distinguishes an author’s voice. Everyone, no matter how banal, slips little catch phrases into their dialogue. It’s your job to identify and replicate them. Nils Parker offers a good example of this.
“There are three camps: guys who say ‘man’, guys who say ‘dude’, guys who say ‘bro’. Personally, I’m a ‘dude’ guy. I’ve had a couple of clients who were card-carrying members of team ‘bro.’ By making sure that I capture those ‘bros’ in the dialogue of their stories, and that I don’t let my own ‘dudes’ slip in, I’ve taken a big step toward sounding like the client.”
3. Get feedback from someone close to the author
When I started ghostwriting my first book, I sent the first chapter to one of the author’s coworkers (with his permission). I wasn’t concerned with factual accuracy or spelling, I just wanted to know: Does this sound like John Doe?
Some authors hesitate to say, “That doesn’t sound like me,” especially if the writing is structurally flawless. Third-party feedback is the most effective strategy I’ve used to avoid slipping into my own language.
This is the easiest part of the process, presuming you’ve done your homework. Once you’ve dialed in your idea, gathered information, and mastered your client’s tone, the writing should flow naturally. In fact, it's more akin to assembling than writing. If I find myself trying to pull ideas out of thin air, I know I went off track somewhere along the way.
I work with two Google Docs side-by-side: one with my outline, the other with my working draft. I call this the writer's equivalent of not shitting where you eat. Mixing the two is a recipe for confusion and frustration.
Finish your draft. Edit as needed. Rinse, wash, and repeat.
Translating business stories into business books might not be as glamorous as penning the lyrics to “God’s Plan” by Drake. But it sure as hell beats writing articles under my own name for $50 a pop.
