“Never tell me anything you don’t want in the book.”
I say that to every client in the hour-long kickoff meeting we hold before the interviews start. Months later I won’t remember which story you told me in confidence and which one you told me for chapter six. If it comes out of your mouth on a recorded call, I’ll treat it as material. I know that’s hard, because sometimes you just want to talk. If something slips out that you wouldn’t want in print, we can still correct it, especially once you get the outline and can tell me to cut a topic or go into another one further.
That line puts you in charge of the boundaries. Plenty of people still dread the interviews from the day they sign, convinced they’ll freeze or ramble for an hour and say nothing useful. I understand the fear, and I don’t share it, because the interviewer carries most of that weight.
Picture a visit to the doctor with a sore shoulder. You don’t walk in with a diagnosis and a prepared statement. Point to where it hurts, and the doctor presses in a dozen places, moves your arm through positions you’d never think to try, and watches for the flinch. By the time you leave, the doctor knows more about your shoulder than you could have explained. A ghostwriting interview works the same way, and you’re the shoulder.
What questions will a ghostwriter ask me?
Mostly indirect ones, about your life around the subject of the book. I ask where you grew up and what your kitchen looked like when you were ten. The details for the book come out of the stories those questions start. I want stories, because I already have the facts.
Direct questions produce rehearsed answers. Ask a founder “What’s your leadership philosophy?” and you’ll get the paragraph from the company website. The story of the first time an employee cried in the founder’s office gives you the philosophy in action, with names and a decision. Sometimes I ask a client to picture the book’s subject through different senses, how it looks and how it feels, so we come at it from different parts of the brain. It’s a little weird, and it’s worked very well, especially for memoirs. If someone ever tells me it smells like rotting flesh, I’ve probably got the wrong client.
Expect questions about failure, too. I probe for setbacks on purpose, because readers want the ups and downs and the recovery. A sanitized arc where everything went right reads like a brochure. For each period of your life I also ask what lesson you learned that stuck with you as true, and what not following it cost you.
You’ll also hear questions about what you want the book to do. Who should read it, what should they do after the last page, and which people in your life will read it first? Your answers shape the outline before a single chapter exists. Most of my books run on about 100 interview questions. The goal is a good book you can do something with, and a book that only looks good on display won’t get you there.
Later sessions get more targeted. Once the outline exists, I’ll come back to fill gaps, like the three years we skipped or the business partner who appeared in one story and vanished. My article on how a ghostwriting project works from start to finish shows where the interviews fit in the whole project. When we get there, I ask for the concrete things, the practices a reader could picture, and I steer away from philosophy. How did you treat your crew differently from other bosses? Background matters, but we don’t need to write an encyclopedia on it.
Sometimes two sessions don’t agree. You describe the heart of the book one way in one session and another way in the next, so I put both versions in front of you. Are these the same argument, and which one is the spine of this book? Then I turn to the reader. Paint me a picture of the person who needs this book the most. What does their Monday morning look like? What keeps them up at night that they’ll never tell their boss?
Why does a ghostwriter ask the same question several different ways?
Because people misremember, and the second and third versions of a story get closer to what happened. That’s the doctor pressing the shoulder from a new angle.
Everyone does it. People merge two events into one, move a conversation to the wrong year, and inflate or shrink what mattered. The first telling of a story is the version you’ve polished over decades of dinner parties. When I come back to it a week later from a different direction, a detail slips out that the polished version dropped, and that’s the one I use.
Don’t take it as a sign I wasn’t listening. I heard you the first time. I’m checking the story from the side you don’t show people, and I want the version that holds up. The questions overlap on purpose, because I want the same events from different time periods and different viewpoints. I also work through a checklist as we go, so if one or two things get missed, it shouldn’t matter.
You’ll notice it happening, and you can help. Tell your ghostwriter when a new version of a story feels truer than the one you’ve always told, because you’re the only person in the room who can make that call.
How do I prepare for my first interview with a ghostwriter?
Lightly. Build a rough timeline of the years the book covers, dig out any documents that jog your memory, and find a quiet place where nobody will interrupt you for an hour or two. Leave the answers alone.
Photos help. So do old calendars, letters and the business plan from the first year. You don’t need to organize any of it. Spread it out and let it remind you of things during the week before the call.
Decide in advance what’s off limits, and say so at the start. I’d rather know on day one that your first marriage stays out than find out in chapter nine. When a client drifts into material that can’t be published, I stop them and ask them to tell it in a publishable way.
Some clients are motormouths and won’t stop talking, so at the start we agree that I’ll sometimes interrupt and get them back on course. One client kept drifting into childhood detours in a book about something else entirely. I said I’d be happy to hear all of it, but it would cost them my hourly rate. That shut it down immediately, and they never did it again. Memoirs are the worst for this.
Tell the people you live with when the sessions are. A spouse who wanders in halfway through a story about your first love changes the story, and a barking dog costs you the thread. An hour with the door closed beats two with interruptions.
Choose the format you’re comfortable in. Every call I do is recorded, on Zoom, by phone, or on a tablet when we meet in person, and I tell clients that up front and in the contract. Many of my clients dislike Zoom and prefer the phone, and local clients meet me in a reserved room at the Safety Harbor library. Use whichever one lets you forget the recording is running. My article on the time a ghostwritten book demands of you covers how many sessions to expect.
What if I’m not good at talking about myself in ghostwriting interviews?
Then you’re in good company, and your ghostwriter should be ready for you. Clients apologize to me all the time for their writing, or tell me they can’t write, and I give them the same answer each time. People hire a ghostwriter for that exact reason.
Talking about yourself on command takes a strange skill, and very few people have it. You’ve spent your whole life being told not to brag. Now a stranger wants an hour on your accomplishments, and your brain locks up.
The fix is to stop talking about yourself and start talking about other people, places and events. Tell me about your boss in 1987, or the plant closing. You’ll be in every one of those stories, and you won’t feel like you’re bragging, since you’re describing somebody else.
Clients also drift to extremes when they do talk about themselves. Some make themselves the hero of every scene, and others spend the whole hour on everything they did wrong. Neither version is true, and I talk them toward the middle, where the believable person lives. My article on a memoir that sounds like bragging covers the hero side of that problem.
Can a ghostwriter get my story if I’m a private person?
Yes. Private people make good books, because they haven’t worn their stories smooth by telling them at every party. The material is fresh, and the ghostwriter’s job is to earn enough trust to hear it.
Why would you open up to someone you met last week? You shouldn’t, until they’ve earned it. Tell your ghostwriter where the lines are. Get the nondisclosure terms in writing; I tell every prospect on the first call that they’re covered, and the statement of work marks everything proprietary.
Go slow on the hardest material. I let clients approach painful subjects over several sessions, and I offer to leave them out entirely.
You also decide how other people appear. Changed names and blurred details keep a private person’s book private in the places that matter, and you can make those calls chapter by chapter.
A private person has more control over the book than they expect. Nothing reaches print without your approval, and you’ll read every chapter before anyone else does. My article on trusting a ghostwriter with what you tell them goes into the confidentiality side.
What if I go blank or get emotional during a ghostwriting interview?
Nothing bad happens. A blank is a signal to change direction, and tears are part of the process. Clients cry in interviews all the time, and nobody has ever needed to apologize for it.
When someone gets upset, I ease off into a light conversation about something unrelated and come back once they’re calm. Embarrassed clients get the same answer from me every time: that emotion is part of the book. A reader can tell whether a chapter was written by someone who felt it, and the feeling you had on the call is the feeling I’m trying to put on the page.
Blanks work the same way. Say you’ve lost the thread, and your ghostwriter will ask about something next to it. The memory comes back on its own ten minutes later, while you’re describing the car you drove that summer. A ghostwriter who pushes you to keep going through a blank gets the rehearsed version, so don’t let anyone rush you.
Keep a notebook by the phone for a few days after each session. Memories keep surfacing after the call ends, in the shower and on the drive to work, and a line or two in that notebook gives the next session a head start.
Will my ghostwriter find my story boring?
No. A professional ghostwriter hears the ordinary details as material. The way you describe your father’s hardware store, the phrase you use for a bad quarter, the joke you told at the wrong funeral: those are what make the book sound like you.
To write in someone’s voice, I have to become them for a while, and I can’t do that from the big moments alone. I need the Tuesday afternoons as much as the award dinners. A client who skips the dull parts is withholding the raw material of their own voice.
Bring up the small stuff even when it feels pointless. What did the office smell like? Which song was on the radio the day you quit? Those answers put a reader in the room with you. Throughout the interviews I’m listening for any story that stands out, because people love stories, and when one comes up I’ll ask for a little more around it.
And the story itself is almost never as ordinary as the client believes. You’ve lived with it so long that it feels like background, and it takes an outsider asking questions to show you what’s in it.
Why won’t a good ghostwriter send me a questionnaire instead?
A questionnaire gets you the rehearsed version, the paragraph from the company website. It can’t press from a second angle or follow a tangent into the story that makes chapter four.
I hate what some agencies do here. A salesperson runs a charming discovery call, and then you get a forty-question form and a writer you’ve never spoken to. The form comes back, the writer builds the book from your typed answers, and you wonder why the manuscript sounds like a stranger describing you. It sounds that way because a stranger wrote it from a form.
That model is crap, and it’s sold at full price. I wrote about that bait and switch in an article on agencies where you interview the salesperson and a stranger writes your book.
A form also loses your spoken voice. People talk in a way they never write, and the way you start every story with “So anyway” shows up on a recording and never survives a typed form. A book in your voice needs those habits.
Written homework has its place. A typed timeline and a few pages of notes on a period you remember well will both help. They supplement the interviews.
What should you do the night before your first ghostwriting interview?
Put your timeline and a few photos on the table, tell the household you’re unavailable for two hours, and go to bed. Skip the rehearsal. Everything you need is already in you, and your ghostwriter’s job is to find it.
After the session, read the summary your ghostwriter sends. I make one for every session with AI’s help and send it to the client, so you can see what came out and correct anything I got wrong. If you’re still choosing someone, my ghostwriting services page explains how the interviews run, and the Book Discovery Intensive is a first engagement where you can see how the questions feel. The rest of the ghostwriting process is laid out in the Ghostwriting Hub.
Questionnaire factories are a scam: they take the money of people who put off a book for years because they’re sure they’ll be bad at the interviews, and never ask a real question at all. Nobody needs to be good at this. Show up, say where it hurts, and let someone who knows the work press in the right places. By the end of the last session, the doctor knows more about the shoulder than the patient ever said out loud.
