Hello,
The clients who worry that their life isn’t interesting enough tend to write the best books. The worry is a good sign: it means they haven’t spent years polishing their story into an anecdote. People who arrive certain their life is remarkable usually arrive with a version of it they’ve told at dinner parties a hundred times, and that version is almost never the true one.
That’s the first thing worth saying about the fears people bring to a first call. Most of them are pointed at the wrong risk.
“Will it still sound like me?”
This is the most common concern, and the real danger isn’t that a ghostwriter will replace your voice with theirs. It’s that they’ll capture the rehearsed version of your voice—the one you use when you know what you’re supposed to say. Avoiding that is the entire craft. It’s why our interviews run long, why we ask the same question more than once in different ways, and why the good material almost always arrives after the part you planned to tell us.
“I’m not a writer.”
Almost none of our clients are. The relevant skill is talking, and most people are considerably better storytellers out loud than they are on the page, because speech carries timing and emphasis that writing has to reconstruct deliberately. Our job is that reconstruction. Yours is to talk.
“What if I remember something wrong?”
You will. Memory is reconstructive, and a memoir isn’t a deposition. We verify what can be verified—dates, sequences, names—and where a detail can’t be pinned down, the honest move is to say so on the page. “I think it was the spring of 1987, though my sister insists otherwise” is a better sentence than a confident wrong date. Readers trust a narrator who admits the edges of what they know.
“What if it gets emotional?”
It will, and I’d be suspicious of a process that promised otherwise. What surprises people isn’t that a hard interview is hard, but how much clearer things feel afterward. You control what’s included; if something belongs in the conversation but not in the book, it stays out, and we’ll strike it from the transcripts if you’d rather it not exist in writing at all.
“What if I start and don’t finish?”
More common than anyone admits. It’s why we don’t ask for a commitment to the whole book on day one—plenty of clients start with a single interview to see how it feels. Momentum usually solves this on its own. The first session is the hard one; by the third, most people are arriving with notes.
None of this has to be resolved first
You don’t need to work through these before you begin. Most of them only resolve by beginning, and the rest turn out to be reasonable instincts about a process that is, in fact, personal and demanding. What matters is having someone across the table who’s done it enough times to know which worries to take seriously.
A thoughtful ghostwriting process creates an environment where stories can emerge honestly, comfortably, and in the author’s own voice, and that’s the very environment that we strive to create.
Have questions or concerns about starting your memoir? Visit MemoirGhostwriting.com to schedule a free consultation and learn more about the process.
MemoirGhostwriting.com helps professionals become known leaders in their field through bestselling books—and helps families preserve life stories through beautifully crafted private memoirs. Whether the goal is to win more business, raise speaking fees, or create a lasting legacy, we handle the entire process end-to-end.
Reply to this email with any publishing or writing questions. My team and I would love to help.
