Before I Write a Word

The biggest mistake ghostwriters make is starting too soon. A client shows up with energy and enthusiasm and a folder full of notes, and there’s a temptation to dive in. To start outlining. To start drafting. To produce something visible that justifies the investment the client has made and the fee they’re paying. I resist that temptation every time. I’ve learned, sometimes the hard way, that the pages you write before you understand the person are pages you eventually throw away.

And those pages do more than waste time. They set the wrong expectations, give the client a false sense of where the book is going, and make the correction harder to execute than building the right foundation would have been.

What does the discovery interview process look like?

Before I write a single word of someone’s book, I interview them. Not once. Not a quick intake call. I mean structured, recorded, multi-session interviews that go deep into what they know, how they think, what they’ve done, and what they believe. The interviews I conducted with Joe Rockey ran across several weeks and covered more than twenty prepared questions, plus all the follow-up those questions generated. By the time we finished, I’d a knowledge base thorough enough to write from with genuine confidence.

What the interviews are actually for

What I needed wasn’t confidence that I knew Joe’s field the way he does. I’m not a sales consultant. I’m never going to know the subject matter at the level of someone who has spent years inside it. That’s not what I need. What I need is to know Joe’s position on the subject matter. His language for it. His examples. The things he believes that most people in his industry would argue with.

His level of certainty on different points and the places where his thinking is still developing. That’s what the interviews produce.

This is the distinction that separates a ghostwriter from a journalist or a researcher. I’m not building an objective account of sales consulting. I’m building a faithful map of how one specific expert thinks about it, including his blind spots and his strong opinions and the places where he’s more certain than the evidence strictly warrants, because all of that is part of his voice and his argument. A book that smooths those out into balanced neutrality stops sounding like the author.

The goal isn’t accuracy in the encyclopedic sense. It’s fidelity to the person.

How are discovery questions built?

The questions I bring into a discovery session are built for the person I’m interviewing. I do research before the first session, looking at what the client has published, what they’ve said publicly, what their clients say about them. I’m looking for the gaps between the polished public version and what I suspect is a richer, more specific private version underneath. Those gaps are where the interesting questions live.

For Joe, the early sessions covered the foundation, who his clients are, what his process involves, how he got into this work. Standard material. Useful but not yet interesting enough to build a book from.

The number of prepared questions is only the skeleton. The real value is in the follow-ups, the where exactly, the why that, the can you give me the specific case, that each prepared question generates. A single planned question about how Joe handles a struggling team can branch into forty minutes of specific stories, qualifications, and exceptions. The prepared list keeps the session moving through the territory that’s to be covered. The follow-ups are where the territory turns out to be more interesting than the map suggested.

The interesting material comes later

The interesting material came when I asked harder questions. Where has his methodology failed? What does he believe about sales and leadership that most consultants in his space wouldn’t say publicly? How has his thinking changed over the years he’s been doing this work? Joe made a distinction early on that shaped how I listened across every subsequent session:

Your motivations flutter. Your strengths are how you’re hardwired.

He was explaining why his assessment work focuses on strengths instead of motivations. The same principle applies to the interview process. I’m not capturing what Joe feels like saying on a given day. I’m capturing how he actually thinks, the hardwired version, not the performed one. And when I pushed him on where that thinking originally came from, his answer was short:

First off, by failing.

Cutco knives. A financial advising firm where the training was minimal and the product was complicated. Years of figuring out what doesn’t work before he’d any real framework for what does. That kind of honesty is what the interview process is designed to surface, and it almost never appears in a first session. The failures are where the real expertise lives, because they’re where the generic advice broke down and the person had to build something that actually worked.

What emerges over a long discovery process?

There’s something that happens over the course of a long discovery process that doesn’t happen in a single conversation. The client stops performing and starts thinking. In the first session, most people give me the version they’ve given a hundred times before, smooth, confident, well-practiced. That version is the starting point. It’s never the destination. By the third or fourth session with Joe, the quality of the conversation had shifted in a way I recognize from working with clients who have real material to mine.

He was following ideas somewhere he hadn’t taken them before. He was qualifying positions mid-sentence when he heard something that didn’t quite hold. He was going deep on stories he’d mentioned in passing, because the passing mention hadn’t done them justice.

That’s the material a book is made of. The examined version of what someone knows, not the polished version.

Each session is recorded and transcribed. The transcripts aren’t the product. The product is the summary document I build from each transcript, stripped of small talk, organized by topic, with the direct quotes that deserve preservation pulled out and kept intact. Joe reviewed each summary. If something was wrong, he corrected it. If something important was missing, he flagged it. By the time we finished the interview phase, the knowledge base was both complete and verified by the person whose expertise it represents.

That verification step matters more than it might seem. A ghostwriter who works from memory or rough notes will eventually put something in a manuscript that’s not quite right. A client story slightly misremembered. A position stated more than the client actually holds it. In a book that goes out under someone’s name, those errors are a problem the author has to live with permanently. The review process catches them before they become permanent, while they’re still cheap to fix.

The whole process is slow by the standards of clients who want a manuscript in thirty days. It’s the right way to write a book, and it’s slow. The books that hold up over time, the ones that actually do the job they were built to do, are built on this kind of foundation. Shortcuts show up on the page. The reader can feel them even when they cannot name them.

Something about the book feels thin, or borrowed, or like it was written by someone who understood the topic in theory but had never really lived inside it.

If you’re thinking about writing a business book, ask yourself one question before you do anything else: could you sit down for multiple hours of structured conversation, across several sessions, and articulate what you know clearly enough that a skilled writer could build a real argument from it? If the answer is yes, you have material worth working with. If you’re not sure, the process itself will give you the answer.

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