Over the last 18 months I’ve met a lot of other ghostwriters. It’s been interesting to see how different our paths have been to bring us to this strange profession. Some started in business and love writing books about it. More have a marketing or publicity foundation, then moved into writing longer text.

My journey started through fiction.

At university, I studied fiction, poetry, and screenwriting. In my final year, I’d finished all the poetry units available so a research project course was created by the lecturer who would become my supervisor in my post-graduate studies. When I worked as an arts journalist, I was always working on other longer form pieces – novels, novellas and screenplays. That passion for longer projects brought me to ghostwriting.

My first ghostwriting projects were fiction – different genres of page turners including thrillers, romance, and coming of age tales. Two screenplay adaptations and a musical. Later, I found myself working with thought leaders in telling their stories or finding ways to thread their concepts and ideas into an engaging tapestry.

My background in fiction means I see everything as a story… some have suggested too much so. It helps with writing non-fiction. To make a memoir heroic. To make a business book a quest. Everything included in the book needs a reason to be there, it has a role in building the narrative.

Even if it’s not obviously an adventure, those elements are there to keep the reader captivated and turning the page.