Collaborating with a professional ghostwriter is not just about word count. There are other values a ghostwriter brings to the partnership. Ideas. Narrative structure. A way to recognise elements for your story that you might have overlooked.
Riddle Me This
Riddles require you to make up the context of the scene and find what fits. Stories build that piece by piece. There’s no cathartic emotional revelation in having the context given like this. There’s no story. There’s no value placed on this information. There’s no tension other than trying to solve the riddle. Stories require that the information we need – hopefully – comes right when we need it in order to make sense of what has happened.
It's About Context
Writing Manually
There was a point while he was writing Fight Club where Chuck Palahniuk came to realise that the two characters – the narrator and Tyler – were the same. It wasn’t a twist he’d thought of before writing. It wasn’t a gimmick to string the reader along. He was writing a damning commentary on masculinity as he saw it in the mid-1990s.
Three Points on the Inciting Incident
The power of your story depends on clearly locating your inciting incident.
The fundamentals of this are often misunderstood.
Story is about transformation. A story is in how a character changes. This change does not come easily but there is something that pushes the character out of their comfort to begin the journey.
The Lady With The Spinning Head
Collected Works
Writing is a process that uncovers what you’re saying. There are times to do it quickly but there must also be moments of revision, reflection, rewriting. And this is slow, sometimes painfully slow.
But that process is worth doing. It uncovers more layers of the beauty around your story, your concept, your idea.
Stories Are About Risk
The Book Writing Blues
Marking Character
What Can You Cut?
Images in Motion
We’ve seen the old zoetropes that put pictures in motion. Perhaps we’ve even made flipbooks when we were at school. The picture changes a little and the motion unfolds. Even as we watch the leaf fall, the dancer move, the horse gallop… we know that it is just small individual images moving fast to make it look like movement.
More Courage
Trusting the writing the process and following it where it goes takes strength and dedication. Finishing the song, putting it down to the record, then turning to the next tune is a cycle that meant they learnt so much in their process, and were open to new ideas to weave into the songs the next time around.
The Value of Finishing
Evoking the Muse and Watering Your Guitar
Surrendering to the Environment
Hire an Elf
John Swartzwelder is a reclusive writer best known for writing a huge amount of the strongest early Simpsons episodes. He also wrote for Saturday Night Live. Now he writes novels. His writing process involves getting the idea out quick. Finish the first draft as fast as possible. Then work deeper in the rewrite.
Experimenting with Structure
When you give away what you think you should be hiding, the story becomes something else. Sometimes the structure falls apart. You need to have things happen in a particular order. But sometimes changing it takes away the scaffolding that was just there to build the important structure. It’s worth experimenting.
Writing to Communicate
People read to connect with a story. Or they read to learn. They talk about the story with friends because it connects with them. They see themselves in the text. Or they’ve learnt something important from reading it.
Rarely has someone sat down with a friend over coffee and gushed over complicated sentences they couldn’t understand.
