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The Writing King Your Ethical Ghostwriter. Your Story, Done Right.

How to Turn Your Expertise Into a Book People Want to Read | The Expert Method

Featuring Richard Lowe on The Expert Method with Ian Gatzke

TL;DR: What This Conversation Establishes

  • Richard finds an expert’s book through 10 to 20 hour-long interviews, then narrows the transcripts down to the subjects where three things meet: what matters to the author, what matters to the audience, and what will sell.
  • A good book is almost never the whole life story. It’s the thread that got someone from where they were to where they are, with the ups and downs and the lessons other people can use.
  • A memoir works like a novel: an inciting incident, a battle to fight, and an ending that makes the reader feel the journey was worth it.
  • Information alone doesn’t hold a reader. Characters, a voice and someone to talk to are what bring a story to life, in fiction and nonfiction alike.
  • AI is a useful tool for finding weak spots in a manuscript, but it can’t write the book, and Richard’s recent clients came to him after trying.

This is the complete interview from Richard Lowe’s appearance on The Expert Method with host Ian Gatzke, published October 31, 2026, presented in full and lightly edited for readability. A few short passages the recording didn’t capture clearly have been left out.

Richard Lowe: The ups and downs. I’m looking for the thread through their life that got them from where they were to where they are. What’s the important thread? What lessons could we draw from your life that are helpful to other people? AI doesn’t have a soul. It doesn’t have an intelligence. It doesn’t have a mind. It’s just word matching.

How does a ghostwriter find what an expert’s book should be about?

Ian Gatzke: Today’s guest is Richard Lowe. Richard is a ghostwriter and author who has written more than 113 books of his own and ghostwritten more than 54 for clients. In our conversation, we talk about how to turn your expertise into a book people want to read. We get into how to find the right story inside of everything you know, what makes that story useful to someone else, and why information alone is not enough. If you get value from this conversation, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a friend. And now please enjoy my conversation with Richard Lowe. Richard, thank you so much for being here.

Richard Lowe: Well, thank you for having me on the show.

Ian Gatzke: Absolutely. So Richard, your expertise spans a lot of different domains, and a lot of your work is around helping experts translate what they know into a really compelling piece of writing, a book, whatever form that might take. These experts, maybe myself included one day, spend years building up knowledge, experience, stories and opinions about their work. But having all of that in your head is very different from knowing what should go into a book. So when someone comes to you with all of this knowledge and experience, how do you help them figure out what the book should be about?

Richard Lowe: A lot of very careful interviews, usually between 10 and 20, each about an hour long, usually over Zoom, although right now I’m doing one in person, which is very, very unique. I’ve had several local people get to me. Apparently my local SEO is really good. So I do interview after interview after interview with some very specific questions and find out what’s really important to them. The idea is what’s important to them, combined with what’s important to their audience, combined with what’s marketable. Those three things have to intersect. We find that intersection. So usually it’s do a bazillion interviews, usually 10 to 20, take all those, get transcripts, throw them into Claude, and have Claude help me narrow that down until I get an answer: the best subjects to talk about are this, this and this, because they’re the ones that meet those criteria the best.

What questions does a ghostwriter ask in book interviews?

Ian Gatzke: Nice. Okay. So you interview them, you pull out the best information, and you do it in a free-form fashion where there’s no locked structure. When you’re engaged in conversation, you’re not really thinking about what you’re saying. You’re just intuitively feeling it out. So I think that free form can really help people brain-dump everything. And then you work with a tool like Claude to help you synthesize things down. In those interviews, and obviously it’s going to be different for every client, do you have a set of specific questions you typically open the first few interviews with?

Richard Lowe: First of all, it’s the Socratic method, meaning it’s questioning. I’m not giving them answers, I’m trying to get their answers. So I’ll ask a question, and that will lead to more questions, which will lead to more questions. I’ll start off with maybe 10 or 20 simple questions. What do you think the book’s going to be about? What’s your life story? That one’s usually not simple. But in a paragraph, in just a couple of minutes, tell me this thing and this thing and this thing, and then those lead to deeper questions, which lead to deeper questions, which lead to deeper questions.

Sometimes the hardest thing is to keep their answers short, because this is usually the first time anybody’s asked them questions about their life. So they’re all excited, and they go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The other side is, of course, they give me no answer, or very short ones. Yes, no. I’m looking for more than yes or no.

One client may have gone to prison for a few years. Why did that happen? How did that happen? What was the prison experience like? How did that help you later in life? Because obviously they’re coming to me, they’re paying my prices, so they’re not in prison anymore and they’ve got some money. So how did they recover? That’s a good story. They went down, down, down, down, down, until they’re in prison for a few years. They get out and they come up, up, up, up, up, maybe another down. And it’s very interesting.

Should a memoir cover your whole life story?

Ian Gatzke: Yeah, it is. And I’d be curious to know, in your experience, I would imagine most of the books don’t end up being the full life story, right? I would imagine you find a moment in their journey.

Richard Lowe: They are never their full life story. You don’t want that, because most lives are boring. They’re exciting to the person who’s living the life, but I don’t want to know the details of everything they’ve done. What I want to know is how did Arnold Schwarzenegger get where he got? If I was to interview him, which I’d love to, how did he get to this part of his career? I’d like to know that thread. I don’t want to know his life. I don’t care. What I want to know is how did he get there? What did he do? What tricks and techniques does he have to pass on?

What makes a life story worth turning into a book?

Ian Gatzke: So you’re using a tool like Claude to help you zoom in and identify which parts of these stories you could package into a book. But you have to give Claude and AI your own preferences. You have to know a lot about this already. So what have you found is the consistent criteria for the parts of people’s stories that make a good book?

Richard Lowe: The ups and downs. I’m looking for the thread through their life that got them from where they were to where they are. What’s the important thread? And that’s what we wrote about.

I had another client who wanted to do their whole life when they came in. Nobody wants to read your whole life. What we want to read about is how you recovered from the alcoholism you suffered from. First of all, how did you get there? And how did you recover from it? Because you’re not an alcoholic now. How did you get out of that? And how was that helpful, and what could you give that would be helpful to other people?

That’s usually something that’s important: what lessons could we draw from your life that are helpful to other people? I dig for that a lot. Okay, tell me a story. You know, I was this wrestler, and I did this and this and this, and this happened. Great. Now how can that help other people? What can they learn from this lesson? Confronting your coach and getting yelled at by your coach, how does that help other people? Well, I learned this and this and this. Great. Tell me more about that. And finally we get to the bottom, where they learned that they didn’t respect their elders, or whatever the lesson was, and that’s what led them into the hole they were in. And then they escaped.

How does the three-act structure work in a memoir?

Ian Gatzke: So there needs to be the mountain to climb in the story. What’s the up and the down? What’s the problem you were faced with? From my amateur’s perspective, I understand that, because I’m thinking back to some of my favorite books, and the ones that resonate with me are about a problem I’m experiencing in my own life, finding purpose or being better at sales, whatever it might be. I’d imagine that makes for a great book. That’s how you identify the idea for a great book they can write, along with tying it into the marketability of the book.

Richard Lowe: You can think of it as a novel. A novel usually has three acts, or a movie. Let’s say three acts. So you’ve got the first act, which is the setup and the inciting incident. What caused them to go on their journey? Sometimes it might be the wife dying, or it might be somebody attacking them. Peter Parker’s uncle was killed by the bad guys, and that motivates him to move through life.

In a memoir, say you had an inciting incident where you got in an accident and you killed a couple of people. You had to deal with the ramifications of that. That makes you want to get out of the alcoholism and go to the 12-step program and all that kind of stuff. And then you have to fight the battle of getting through all the withdrawals and learning that you can’t hang out with alcoholics anymore. You can’t go to the bar anymore. If you’re quitting smoking, you can’t go hang around with smokers anymore. Not possible. So that might be the monster you’re fighting. And then the friend who tries to push it on you: go ahead and have a drink, just one drink. That’s a non-friend, all of a sudden. And you go through this whole period of life.

We present it in such a way that it’s a story. A memoir is very similar to a novel. I don’t write just memoirs. I write other books too, like technical books, corporate books, children’s books, fiction books, all kinds of stuff. They’re all fun.

How do you write a novel with twelve acts?

Ian Gatzke: Yeah, love that. So when you’re doing these interviews and working with someone to find the book they can write, it sounds like you’re looking for the moments in their life where you can find that complete three-act structure, with the different characters. Here are the moments, the situations, the circumstances in your life where we can tell this story.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. Yeah. I have one novel called Shield of Ashes, one I wrote for me. It’s about World War III, and it’s a 12-act structure, because there are different countries involved, different countries fighting. So we solve this one, and then we go on to the next one, and the next one and the next one. It was pretty complicated to write, because of all the technologies involved, missile technology and things I’m not that familiar with. It was very interesting, and the acts all have to tie together.

Ian Gatzke: You’ve got to try and land that ship. Twelve acts.

Richard Lowe: You’ve got to bring that to a coherent landing. Now, your Marvel movies are all three acts. Every single one of them is a three-act structure, and they’re very simple three-act structures. So you can imagine 12 acts of a nuclear war between multiple countries, involving multiple weapon systems, with multiple religions, multiple nationalities, multiple people and multiple points of view. That book challenged me, but it was interesting to write.

How do you land the ending of a long book series?

Ian Gatzke: I can only imagine. Each individual element, and then each character with different relationships and things you have to balance. That’s incredibly impressive. I’d never been much of a fiction reader until a couple of years ago. I read Percy Jackson and The Hunger Games growing up, and then a client introduced me to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, that trilogy. It was excellent. And at the beginning of last year, a good friend told me to read Red Rising. Doing a big series like that justice with the ending is so hard. Can you relate to that idea?

Richard Lowe: It’s multiple endings. Every book has to end itself and then move on to the next book, which then ends. So you’ve got this rising structure, like The Lord of the Rings. It has three books, and each one of those books has multiple endings in it. And then at the end, you’ve got to bring them all to a close.

One of my favorite books that I wrote for myself is called The Eternal War. It’s about the war between heaven and hell, but that’s background information. The real story is the question I asked myself: what if an AI is conscious, dies and goes to hell? And then that AI determines the reason for heaven and hell existing.

Ian Gatzke: Fascinating.

Richard Lowe: It was an interesting book to write.

Do you need an outline to write a novel?

Ian Gatzke: No doubt. Pierce Brown is the author of the Red Rising books, and I’ve become such a fan that I listen to a bunch of podcasts where he talks about his writing. Every writer is different. He’s not one to make outlines, but when he’s writing, and it’s going to sound like a cliche, he really tries to immerse himself in and become the characters. Is that something you can relate to?

Richard Lowe: Yeah, I don’t write from an outline either. I write from what I call the ink spot method. I have a basic structure in my head, and then I start from, say, the middle. Then I write another ink spot and another ink spot and another ink spot, and these things grow until they join. It’s like dropping some drops of water on the street and then adding more and more water until they all interconnect into a pond.

Is writing fiction harder than writing nonfiction?

Ian Gatzke: I would imagine writing nonfiction would be so much easier than writing fiction, because in fiction you have to invent all the new laws, all the new characters, the religions, the political structure, the tension, all of it.

Richard Lowe: That depends on the kind of fiction. I’ve also written historical fiction set in Rome, based on an actual person who lived during the Year of the Four Emperors. He’s the one who brought one of those four emperors to power. It’s called A Treachery of Legions, and he’s the guy who decided which one of those emperors would win. I made it up, of course, but I wrote his whole story from beginning to end. I used real facts, but there aren’t that many facts about him, so a lot of it was made up.

Historical fiction is totally different from science fiction. It’s totally different from fantasy, or from romance. I’ve done several romances, and it’s even different writing a book from a female point of view as opposed to a male point of view. Most writers who are male tend to write women as if they’re still in the male point of view. They’re just pretending they’re women. But you have to put yourself in a woman’s place, which means you have to talk to a few women and get their point of view.

As far as the difference between fiction and nonfiction, yeah, they’re wildly different. There’s no relationship. Most writers can’t do both. They’re very, very different. And I write both. I’m ambidextrous, so to speak.

How do you write from the point of view of someone from another era?

Ian Gatzke: A lot of fiction can be grounded in reality, and that surprised me. Listening to these authors describe their work, Pierce Brown is a complete nerd for Greek history and Roman history, and he uses so many call-outs and elements from it.

Richard Lowe: Indeed, indeed. A historical novel I wrote is called Family on Ice. There was a volcano that blew up about 70,000 years ago, give or take, and it wiped out 95% of humanity at the time. I wrote a novel about a family who survived that and then had to survive until they could find a place to live that wasn’t devastated. But I had to write it from their point of view, not as a 21st-century person. And that was, wow.

Ian Gatzke: How do you do that? How do you immerse yourself in that kind of person? How do you understand what it would be like to be them? They’re gone.

Richard Lowe: Method acting, basically. Same as a method actor. Like you were saying, you become those characters for a while. But the key is that I write five or six books at a time, so I have to swap through the day, literally. In the morning I’m writing one of my novels, and later I’m on something else. Swapping through the day is something very few authors can do, because you have to immerse yourself in the book. I can do that on multiple fronts. I can even switch every hour or so.

What makes a good ending in a book?

Ian Gatzke: I think we need a different word than ambidextrous, Richard. That’s a little more advanced than being able to use your left hand. I’m not working on an ending myself, but given your experience writing so many different kinds of stories: a good ending seems to be the most elusive thing in creating something for other people. Is there anything you can say about how to write a good ending?

Richard Lowe: A good ending. Well, first of all, there are a couple of things that lead up to that. The first is the concept of a good death. You’re writing a fictional world, and you have a character you’ve been going along with for a long time, and then the character just dies. Tarantino’s very, very famous for this. His characters just die. That’s not a good death. The audience gets pissed off. I won’t watch one of his movies now, because I just know. It’s not that my favorite character is going to get killed. I don’t mind that. It’s that they’re not going to get killed right.

Those characters need to come to a good end. Like Quicksilver in the Ultron movie. They bring him in, he does a few things and he dies. Well, why did you even bother bringing him in? It’s a major character and he’s dead. It doesn’t make any sense. But then you can counter that with Game of Thrones. Ned Stark. That’s a good death. We lead up to it. We get to know his reasons. We know his ethics. It came as a surprise, but everything led up to it. And then the death made sense, and it made the rest of the story more powerful. That’s what’s called a good death.

Now, as far as an ending goes, it needs to bring things to a close, even if there’s going to be a sequel. The worst thing of all is a book that just ends because it’s going to have a sequel. I’m not going to read the sequel, because you didn’t give me a satisfying ending.

If you’re writing nonfiction, say a memoir, hopefully the person’s still alive. Well, I wrote a memoir about a grandfather who was in a POW camp in World War II. He’s long gone, but I wrote his book, and the ending was that he got home. The Allies won World War II, and he was able to come home and be with his family. That’s a good ending.

You want to leave your readers with something that makes them go, yes, that was worth the journey. That’s the good ending. It was worth reading 700 pages. My book Shield of Ashes has a really good ending, if I do say so myself. Even though a billion people die in the novel, it was a nuclear war, you read it and go, yeah, that was worth the journey. If it’s not worth the journey, then you failed as an author.

Ian Gatzke: Right. That payoff, bringing things to a close.

Richard Lowe: It doesn’t have to close off all the loose ends. It doesn’t even have to be satisfying. It just has to be worth the journey. I paid money for this. I’m investing sometimes weeks of time reading a book or listening to an audiobook, or going to the theater to watch a Marvel movie. That’s one reason I don’t go to Marvel movies anymore. They’re just not worth two hours in the theater. It’s the same exact story, the same junk, the same everything.

Why does a story need twists and a character to talk to?

Ian Gatzke: Yeah, I totally agree. With a lot of stories, I know how it’s going to end. It’s all going to be happy-go-lucky, everything’s okay, the good guys win. How do you feel about that? Is the unexpected part of a good ending?

Richard Lowe: It’s part of a good story. You need a twist, or two, or five, or a hundred. If it’s all predictable, nobody cares. It’s got to be unpredictable. And the characters need somebody to talk to.

I wrote a novel based on a computer game called Dungeon, a game that was popular in the 1970s and 80s, and the novel walks through that whole game. I originally wrote it as one person walking through the game. Then I reread it and said, this is absolutely boring. Why? There’s nobody for this person to talk to. So I invented a character, a woman, and a lizard dog that accompanied the hero through the game and gave him somebody to talk to. And suddenly it was alive. That’s what was missing.

I’ve also got a series called Victorian Reimagined. It takes Jules Verne’s and H.G. Wells’s books and rewrites them from a modern point of view, still in the same time period, but written the way I think makes them better: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Mysterious Island, The Time Machine and one other. Jules Verne tends to write very flat A-to-Z books, and they’re usually a political manifesto. H.G. Wells is very strong, and he usually says something political. They’re good books, but they’re weak on characterization, and they’re from their time. So they treat minorities the way you’d expect from somebody who lived in the 1800s. Not good. At the time he thought he was being very progressive, but he definitely wasn’t.

So I rewrote The Mysterious Island. There’s a black man in The Mysterious Island named Neb, and I rewrote him as a real character instead of a paperweight. Neb has a backstory. He’s from Cameroon. He was a slave. He got his freedom. I had to do a lot of research, because I was taking a risk writing from a black man’s point of view as a white man. I tried really hard to understand what a black man would feel like just after the Civil War, and I think it came out pretty good. A black reader would have to read it and tell me. It probably doesn’t appeal to everybody, because I made the writing style a little different from most. It’s narrated by a reporter, and there’s a lot of narration. But it’s a very different point of view from the original book. And tough to write.

Why isn’t information alone enough for a nonfiction book?

Ian Gatzke: Talk about a completely different perspective to put yourself in. Here we are in 2026, and you’re writing from the perspective of a black man after the Civil War, trying to assimilate into a society with all the lingering tensions that came with it. Just because the war was fought and won doesn’t mean it was a comfortable situation.

There’s so much to unpack in every answer you give. But one thing I’d love to underline is that the narration and the characters made the story alive. I think that translates to fiction and nonfiction. Nobody wants to read your nonfiction book if it’s just a series of information. They can get that from AI. They can get that from a Google search. But your story, your personal experience, your personal spirit infused into it, maybe some dialogue, some other characters, other people involved, that’s what brings it alive. That’s what gets people to connect with the information. That’s my guess at how the idea applies to nonfiction.

Can AI write a book as well as a ghostwriter?

Richard Lowe: You’re hitting it on the head. People ask me all the time, why should I pay your rates when I could just have Claude or ChatGPT create it for me for free? And it’s exactly what you said. AI doesn’t have a soul. It doesn’t have an intelligence. It doesn’t have a mind. It’s just word matching. Doing emotions is really hard for it, and that’s because, first of all, AI doesn’t know the whole story. It just knows the bits and pieces.

I’ve gone deep into this. I wrote some articles on my website that have layers, and you click buttons and it takes the layers of the AI off. There are nine layers, and you get to see the words, the spine, this, that, and finally you’ve got something real. It’s kind of like whack-a-mole if you’re trying to fix it, because you fix one thing and then there’s another, and another, and another.

Using AI as a tool is a great thing. Say you’re writing a novel about a crash landing on the moon, and they have to rescue the crew. That sounds like a good premise. They’ve only got a limited amount of time, so now you’ve got a time barrier. They have a limited amount of oxygen. You have to get a rocket up there fast, but you don’t have any ready. So how do you do that? What you’d do with AI is take that manuscript, feed it in, and say, okay, find me all the weak spots in this novel. Novels usually sag in the middle, so find me the place in the middle where this one sags and becomes boring. Tell me what I can cut. How does the dialogue look? You’re not having it write for you. You’re having it interpret for you, as a tool.

Ian Gatzke: Using it as a tool is a really great point. You could use it as a companion, a thinking partner: help me think through this, where can I make revisions? Another way to use it in the scenario you laid out is, how would the physics of this crash on the moon work? What would be the likely damage? You’re not a moon expert. You have to learn about these things. That could be a fascinating way to use AI in the process.

Another thing you mentioned earlier is that you have to program AI the right way, and to do that you need that sense and judgment yourself, first to give the tool the right instructions, and second to evaluate the output. That’s why people like you, Richard, aren’t going anywhere. AI is not going to replace the experience and judgment you’ve built up. It’s going to be a really useful tool to enhance and compound your ability to help people, but the value in working with you is not going anywhere.

Richard Lowe: Every client I’ve gotten in the last year has come to me after trying to write their book with AI, and they say, the book I wrote with AI sucked. Can you help me, please?

Ian Gatzke: Yeah, there you go.

Richard Lowe: I tell them my rates, and they say, I don’t care. Just write the book.

Ian Gatzke: Right, right. Love it.

Richard Lowe: Because they’re frustrated. They’re really frustrated with it.

Where does a ghostwriter’s next book idea come from?

Ian Gatzke: I can only imagine. And to your whack-a-mole point, everybody can relate. If you spend any amount of time working with AI on something important, you give it one little bit of feedback and suddenly there are 900 things that pop up. You can lose control really quickly. One final thing I’d love to linger on: you’ve written about so many different stories. How do you know what’s next for you? How do you find the next thing you want to write about?

Richard Lowe: Well, first of all, my ghostwriting is client-driven. They come to me with an idea. I don’t accept all customers. There are things I won’t do. I won’t do books that teach people how to commit criminal acts, for example. I won’t do a revenge book, where, say, a woman or a man who’s been divorced is trying to get revenge on their ex and wants to write all the bad stuff. I won’t do that, for legal and ethical reasons. So that’s phase one: people come in and say, I want to write a book, but I don’t know how to write. Please write it for me. And I do.

For my own books, the ideas just come. They haven’t stopped yet, and I’ve got several more on the list. One is going to be called Demon Hunter, which is about exactly that. It’ll be a fantasy novel, obviously, but I’m going to throw some twists in there, like time travel. I want to write a Groundhog Day kind of thing, a time loop. I’m fascinated by time travel stories. And I’ve got a ton of others. When I get an idea, I’ve got a notebook, and I just write down the idea. Then I come back to it later. Maybe, maybe not. I’ve got hundreds of ideas in that notebook. Nobody think about stealing that notebook.

Ian Gatzke: That’s amazing. So it’s an expression of your intuition and the ideas that come to you. You write it down, you come back, you read through the notebook, and whatever resonates, you pick up and dive in with the ink spots.

Richard Lowe: And that’s for fiction and nonfiction. With nonfiction, I’ll have an idea. I had one recently, and I thought, well, people live in fear all the time. That’s a great subject for a book. I lived in fear for part of my life, because I felt like I had to have a job. I was afraid of leaving my job. There were all kinds of fears. When I finally did leave, I was like, oh, this is nothing. I could go be a writer and make money that way. It turned out to be nothing to be afraid of. So I wrote that book, Don’t Live in Fear.

I’ve got experience in survival, so I wrote a book called Real World Survival. It has my experiences being stuck in a forest fire, and in three hurricanes and three significant earthquakes. I haven’t been stuck in a volcano yet. You know, Krakatoa is going up right now.

Ian Gatzke: Really?

Richard Lowe: Yeah, Krakatoa is blowing up big time. Look it up.

Ian Gatzke: Yep, it sure is. 340,000 people stranded. Okay, great. All of my late-night scare-myself YouTube rabbit holes are starting to come true.

Richard Lowe: And that’s a great subject for a book. What happens if you’re stuck at an active volcano?

Ian Gatzke: Everything we’ve talked about shows up in that one answer. For the nonfiction you’ve written, you looked at your own story and found the mountains, the battles you’ve won, the problems you’ve solved in your own life, and said, that’s a book. It comes so naturally because it’s something you’ve done for a long time. Richard, there’s so much you have to share, and I’d be honored to have you back on to talk about things like how to live a life unburdened by fear. I think that’s an important subject.

Richard Lowe: Feel free to invite me anytime. We could even do a weekly one if you want. That’s probably too much, but monthly or something. Happy to do that. Just invite me.

What one message would Richard Lowe put on a billboard?

Ian Gatzke: Love it. I have one final question that I ask every guest. But before we get to that, Richard, how can people find you?

Richard Lowe: They can go to TheWritingKing.com, and they’ll find my whole site. If you want to make an appointment to get directly to me, go to contact.thewritingking.com, and that goes directly to my scheduling. I also have a podcast I run as often as I can called Leaders and Their Stories, and you can sign up for it at leaders-stories.thewritingking.com. I’m looking for leaders.

Ian Gatzke: Cool. We’ll have the links to all of that in the description of the episode. And prepare yourself: when you go to thewritingking.com, you’re going to feel bad about your own website, because the amount of content Richard has on there is unbelievable. Go check it out. Richard, thank you again so much for your time. My final question, as I mentioned, is one I ask every guest. If you had a giant billboard that everyone in the world could see for 10 seconds, with one message to the world, what would it say, and why?

Richard Lowe: Put me on the spot there, huh? I would say be nice to each other. There’s no reason for all of this hatred that’s going around. Just be nice to each other. You’ll find it’s amazing how much better life is if you’re just nice to each other. Knock off all this stupid stuff.

Ian Gatzke: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more.

Richard Lowe: When the cop stops you on the freeway because you’re speeding, just ask him how his day is and be nice to him. When somebody’s talking to you and they have an alternate political view, just be nice to them and find out what they think. You don’t have to get in an argument with them. Anytime, just be nice to people, talk nice to them, and treat them as you’d like to be treated. It’s amazing how life improves just by that simple thing. The other message would be, send me money.

Ian Gatzke: Especially on a billboard. I love it. Be nice to each other. Richard, thank you so much for the time.

Richard Lowe: Thank you.

Find Richard Lowe at thewritingking.com.

Quotable moments

What I want to know is how did he get there? What did he do? What tricks and techniques does he have to pass on? — Richard Lowe
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A memoir is very similar to a novel. — Richard Lowe
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If it’s not worth the journey, then you failed as an author. — Richard Lowe
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There’s nobody for this person to talk to. So I invented a character. And suddenly it was alive. — Richard Lowe
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You’re not having it write for you. You’re having it interpret for you, as a tool. — Richard Lowe
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It’s amazing how life improves just by that simple thing. — Richard Lowe
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Frequently Asked Questions

How many interviews does a ghostwriter do before writing a book?
Richard Lowe usually does 10 to 20 interviews of about an hour each, mostly over Zoom. He asks questions in the Socratic style, so each answer leads to deeper questions, then has the transcripts narrowed down to the subjects that matter to the author, matter to the audience and will sell.
Should a memoir tell someone’s entire life?
Almost never. Richard looks for the thread that got the person from where they were to where they are, such as recovering from alcoholism or rebuilding after prison, and the lessons from it that can help other people. The rest of the life story usually stays out.
What is the ink spot method of writing a novel?
It’s how Richard writes without an outline. He keeps a basic structure in his head, writes a scene from somewhere like the middle, then writes others around the book, and lets them grow until they join, the way drops of water on pavement spread into one puddle.
What makes the ending of a book work?
The reader has to feel the journey was worth it. The ending doesn’t need to tie off every loose end, even in a series, but each book has to end itself. Characters who die need a good death that the story has led up to, the way Ned Stark’s does in Game of Thrones.
Can you write a book with ChatGPT or Claude instead of hiring a ghostwriter?
Richard says every client he’s taken on in the last year came to him after trying, frustrated with the result. He uses AI as a tool to find where a manuscript sags, what can be cut and how the dialogue reads, but not to write the book, because it doesn’t know the whole story and can’t carry the emotion.
Where can I watch Richard Lowe on The Expert Method?
The full episode with host Ian Gatzke is on this page, and the original is on The Expert Method’s YouTube channel at youtube.com/watch?v=GKc0J2PIIk0.

Part of Richard Lowe on Air, his complete run of podcast, radio, and video guest appearances.

About the Author
Richard Lowe, professional ghostwriter

Richard Lowe is a professional ghostwriter and author with 113+ books authored and 54+ ghostwritten. Before writing full time he spent 33 years in enterprise technology, including 20 years as Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services at Trader Joe's. He writes nonfiction, fiction and memoir, and works with executives and experts on books that build authority.

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Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post are solely those of Richard Lowe and are based on personal experience and research. This content is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as professional legal, financial, accounting, or business advice. Always consult with qualified professionals before making important business or legal decisions. Richard Lowe is not a lawyer, accountant, or licensed professional advisor, and this content does not establish any professional relationship.