People ask how I’ve written 113+ books under my name and 54+ for clients without losing my mind.
I tell them about the boat. The USS Constitution. “Old Ironsides.” A wooden ship model with over a thousand pieces. Rigging that required tweezers and a magnifying glass. The box showed this gorgeous three-masted warship, every cannon in place, every line of rigging perfect. The kind of thing you’d see in a maritime museum behind glass.
I bought it because it looked like a challenge. I’m the kind of person who sees “difficult” as an invitation. Same reason I became a ghostwriter. Somebody else’s story, their voice, their life, assembled into something coherent? Difficult. Interesting. That’s the work I want.
Three weeks in, I had a half-finished hull taking up my entire dining room table.
Sawdust everywhere. Tiny wooden planks scattered across the floor where I’d knocked them off reaching for the glue. The smell of wood stain had embedded itself in my curtains. And I was on my hands and knees with a flashlight, searching for a piece smaller than my thumbnail that had pinged off into the void.
“Son of a…”
That became my mantra. Every night. Son of a… this plank doesn’t fit. Son of a… I glued the wrong piece. Son of a… I have to rip this apart again.
I’d gotten impatient. The instructions said to let the hull cure for 24 hours before adding the deck planking. I gave it six. Close enough, right? Wrong. The hull warped. Not much. Just enough that nothing lined up anymore. Every piece after that was slightly off. I compensated. Forced things. Told myself it would work out.
It didn’t.
By the end of week four, I was standing in my living room in the small hours, holding a crooked, gap-riddled disaster that looked nothing like the picture on the box. I’d skipped steps. Jumped ahead because I was excited. Ignored the structure because I thought I knew better.
Old Ironsides had defeated the British navy. She couldn’t survive me. I didn’t throw it in the trash.
I threw it at the wall.
The hull exploded. Tiny wooden planks everywhere. A mast embedded itself in the drywall. Three weeks of work reduced to kindling in one satisfying moment of rage. Then I stood there in the silence, breathing hard, sawdust settling around me like snow.
I went to bed. The next morning, I swept up the pieces and bought a 1/32 scale tank. That tank taught me how to write books.
How is building a model like writing a book?
Plastic instead of wood. Maybe 200 pieces instead of a thousand. Instructions that made sense. A project I could finish in a weekend instead of a month.
And I followed the steps this time. Every single one. No skipping ahead. No “close enough.” No forcing pieces that didn’t want to fit. The turret didn’t go on until the chassis was done. The tracks didn’t go on until the wheels were set. I let glue cure. I test-fitted before committing. I built the damn thing in order. When I finished, it looked like the picture on the box. Clean. Tight. Professional. That tank sits on my shelf today. The Constitution is probably still in my drywall somewhere. Model building has rules. You don’t glue the turret before the chassis is done. You don’t paint before you’ve test-fitted the parts. You don’t skip steps because you’re excited to see the finished product.
Every experienced modeler learns this the hard way. Rush ahead, something doesn’t fit, and now you’re prying apart pieces you already glued. Trying to fix a mistake that wouldn’t have happened if you’d just followed the sequence.
Ghostwriting works the same way. When a client comes to me with their life story, I don’t start writing chapter one on day one. That’s the Constitution mistake. Jumping into the build before you understand the scope. I interview first. Listen. Take notes. Figure out where the story starts. That isn’t always where the client thinks it starts. Identify the scenes that matter and the ones that feel important but add nothing.
Then I outline. Then I draft. Then I revise. One piece at a time. In the right order. No wild tangents.
What Happens When a Client Wants to Skip Ahead?
I had a client once who wanted to start with his business philosophy. Fifteen pages of lessons learned and wisdom gained. He’d written it all out already, proud of every word.
“This is the foundation,” he said. “Everything else builds on this.”
I read it. Dense. Abstract. The kind of thing that sounds deep when you’re writing it after midnight but puts readers to sleep by paragraph three.
“Where’s the story?” I asked.
“What do you mean? This is the story. My philosophy.”
“No. This is the conclusion. Where’s the scene where you learned this? Where’s the moment it became real?”
Silence.
He didn’t have it. He’d skipped ahead to the wisdom without building the foundation that made the wisdom matter. Glued the turret on before the chassis was ready. We went back. Interviewed. Found the scene: him sitting in a parking lot after getting fired, mid-afternoon, staring at his steering wheel. Realizing everything he’d believed about success was wrong. That scene went in chapter one. The philosophy came later, after readers had a reason to care.
One piece at a time. In the right order. No wild tangents.
When should you follow the outline, and when should you depart from it?
Experienced modelers know when to deviate from the instructions. Aftermarket parts. Different paint schemes. Small modifications that make the build yours.
But you have to know the rules before you break them.
New modelers who skip steps or improvise too early end up with gaps, misaligned parts, and builds that look wrong even if they can’t explain why. I know because I’ve got a garbage bag full of early mistakes to prove it.
I also collect pewter fantasy miniatures and paint them. I’ve got about 1,000 painted and about 5,000 still waiting. You paint them about 20 at a time because they’re all similar, so you do all the faces, then the next part, and it’s not as bad as it sounds. When something’s bugging me, close-up work takes my mind off it.
Same with memoir. Clients sometimes want to start with their ancestry. Or a lengthy description of the historical context of their childhood. Or the “setup” they think readers need before the story begins.
That’s improvising before you’ve mastered the basics. I push back hard when a memoir wants to open with chapters of ancestry and historical context, because readers quit before they reach the part the client lived, and then the whole investment sits unread. The story has to work as a story first, and the flourishes can come once it does.
When I interview clients, I’m listening for the structure underneath the chaos. The moments that matter. The turning points. The scenes that will anchor each chapter. Once we have that skeleton, we can add flourishes. But the skeleton comes first.
How Long Should the Book Be?
The Constitution was a 1/96 scale model. Beautiful. Ambitious. Completely wrong for my situation. I didn’t have the space for it. Didn’t have the patience for rigging that would take longer than the rest of the build combined. I’d picked a project that didn’t fit my constraints. No amount of stubbornness was going to fix that. The tank was 1/32. Smaller box. Fewer parts. Something I could finish on a Saturday afternoon and display somewhere without rearranging my entire apartment. Picking a project that fits your constraints is the smartest decision you’ll make, and it’s the one first-time authors skip most.
Some clients come to me wanting to write a 400-page epic covering every moment of their lives from birth to present day. Every job. Every relationship. Every vacation. Every lesson learned.
That’s the Constitution. The better book is usually tighter. The five years that changed everything. The one relationship that shaped who you became. The single project that defined your career.
I’ve got nothing against ambition. The mistake is an author pouring years into a book so big it never gets finished, when a tighter one would already be out in the world working for them.
I had a client who wanted to cover his entire 40-year career in finance. Every deal. Every merger. Every market crash he’d lived through.
“That’s not a memoir,” I told him. “That’s an encyclopedia.”
We narrowed it down to three years. The years when everything almost fell apart. When his marriage, his business, and his health all hit crisis points at the same time. That’s a book. That’s a story with stakes. That’s the right scale for the space.
Scope matters. A focused story that gets finished beats an ambitious one that sits half-done on your dining room table until you throw it at a wall.
What proves that a piece-by-piece approach works?
I didn’t just figure this out from client work. I lived it.
My Life in Crazytown is my own memoir. Nineteen years in a dysfunctional family where the rules changed without warning. The hypervigilance that trauma created. The systematic thinking I developed to survive. How my AuDHD brain got wired in those chaotic years, and how all of it became my edge later in life.
I could have written a bloated therapy session covering sixty-five years. Every job. Every relationship. Every decade since leaving home.
That would have been the Constitution.
I found the structure instead. The childhood and teenage years that shaped everything. The scenes that mattered. The throughline connecting a chaotic upbringing to the person I became. The worst things that happened to me became the best things about me. I didn’t see that until I wrote it down. Didn’t see the pattern until I forced myself to put the story on paper. That’s the model builder’s approach. One piece at a time. Right scale for the space. No wild tangents.
Does Your Story Already Have a Structure?
You might not see it yet. That’s normal. When you’re living your life, it feels like random chaos. One thing after another with no pattern. You can’t see the shape because you’re inside it. But there’s a structure underneath. Turning points. Themes. Moments that echo across decades. The thing that happened when you were seventeen that explains the decision you made at forty. Finding that structure is the work. Like model building, it goes faster when you follow a process instead of improvising your way into a wall.
The Memoir Writing Bundle breaks down that process. How to find your story’s shape. How to identify the scenes that matter. How to build your book one piece at a time without getting lost in a thousand wooden planks you can’t tell apart.
How do you start building your book?
The tank’s still on my shelf. Clean lines. Proper structure. Built one piece at a time. Some projects teach you what not to do. Others teach you how to finish. A good story dying half-built on somebody’s hard drive because nobody gave the author a sequence to follow is a needless loss. Yours deserves to be finished, so pick the right scale, do the steps in order, and see it through.
