Before I typed a single word as a professional ghostwriter, I was a photographer of dancers.
For nearly a decade I immersed myself in the world of movement, color and performance. Every frame I captured told a story, and it taught me to look beyond the surface. I was beyond photographing dancers. I was documenting passion, culture and identity.
That work led to annual birthday parties where a hundred to two hundred and sixty dancers would gather to celebrate life, friendship and art. One year I rented a pirate ship. Another time I booked a town hall and brought in live performers and ethnic catering.
They were more than parties. They were immersive storytelling experiences, and each one taught me something about the narrative arcs I would later help clients build in their books.
Who was Marjhani?
One of my closest photography subjects. A bold and wildly creative dancer with a bone through her nose and tattoos that once made my conservative side shudder.
We became friends.
I put that plainly because the shudder is the honest part and leaving it out would make me sound better than I was. I came from somewhere that had opinions about people who looked like that, and I had absorbed them without examining them, and what changed my mind was not an argument.
Through her and others in that community I learned to embrace diversity of expression. I also realized something deeply important: everyone, no matter how unconventional, has a story that deserves to be told.
The book on this: The Ghostwriting Advantage is 48 chapters on hiring one from the buyer’s side: vetting, contracts, pricing, and what the process asks of you.
What did those years teach?
The thing I still use every day, which is that the surface of a person is never the story.
That sounds like a sentiment. In practice it is a working method. When somebody sits down for an interview, what arrives first is the version they have told before: the polished summary, the anecdote that gets a reliable reaction, the account of themselves that has been sanded smooth by repetition.
None of that is the book. It is the surface, and the surface is what a person shows a photographer in the first ten minutes too, before they forget the camera is there.
Photography taught me to wait for the moment after that, and to recognize it when it came. Ghostwriting is the same job conducted with different equipment.
Why does that matter for somebody hiring a ghostwriter?
Because it tells you what to look for, and it is not writing samples.
Writing is learnable and plenty of people can do it competently. What decides whether your book sounds like you is whether the person across the table is genuinely curious about you, and can tell the difference between what you said and what you meant.
You can test that in a first conversation. A ghostwriter who spends the meeting describing their process is selling. One who spends it asking about you, and asking second questions that could only have come from listening to your first answer, is doing the job already.
What if your story feels too small?
If you have ever wondered whether your story is too much, too weird, or too ordinary, I am here to tell you it is not. It is yours, and that makes it worth telling.
The too weird worry is nearly always wrong, and Marjhani is my evidence. The too ordinary worry is wrong for a different reason, which is that ordinary is what readers recognize. A life with no dramatic incident in it can still contain the thing somebody needed to read, and frequently does.
What genuinely does not work is a book with nothing at stake for the person writing it. That is a different problem from being ordinary and it is worth being honest about which one you have.
How did a photographer end up doing this?
By an unlikely turn that started in a server room, which is a different essay.
What matters here is that the two are not as separate as they look. Both are about being in the room with somebody until they stop performing. Both require you to be interested in a person for their sake instead of for what you are getting from them. Both fail in exactly the same way, which is when the person behind the equipment has already decided what they are going to find.
What would I tell somebody choosing a ghostwriter?
Watch whether they ask second questions. Anybody can ask the first one from a list.
Notice whether they are curious or polite. Those look similar for about fifteen minutes.
Do not lead with the polished version. They will get it anyway. What matters is whether they can hear past it.
Assume your story is worth it. The doubt is nearly universal and nearly always wrong.
Ask what they think your book is about after the first conversation. The answer tells you whether they were listening or waiting.
Marjhani would find it funny that she is in a book about ghostwriting. She is in it because she is the reason I know that the person in front of me is never who I assumed, and everything I do for a living rests on that.
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