Ghostwriting a Tribute Book, Eulogy or Obituary for Someone You Lost

Deanna Bennett founded the East Lake Writers’ Workshop in Palm Harbor, and I sat at her critique table for years, critiquing her Anna chapters along with everybody else’s. Week after week, the research for her Anna Immigration Trilogy came out a chapter at a time: her grandmother, fifteen years old, crossing from Lithuania in steerage in 1914 and coming through Ellis Island. After her husband Tom died in 2018, Deanna wrote The Year of Firsts, a memoir of the year that followed. Then she finished Anna’s Daughter, the memoir her mother Helen had started and never completed.

When Deanna died, I wrote a tribute to her for this site. I keep a tribute section for people I knew, and her page sits there alongside one for Ayse Cerami.

Until the question came up, I’d never thought of a tribute book, a eulogy or an obituary as a ghostwriting project. It’s a good idea, and a ghostwriter can do it well. Every family has a person whose stories live in four or five heads and nowhere on paper, and each time one of those heads is gone, part of the person goes with it.

Your grandparents’ generation kept this record without trying. Letters piled up in a shoebox in the hall closet, and an aunt who remembered everything told the old stories at every holiday dinner until the grandchildren could recite them. You’ve watched that arrangement break down. Families live three time zones apart now, and the letters turned into texts that disappear with the phone. When your aunt dies, her stories end with her, and nobody notices the gap until your grandchild asks a question nobody left alive can answer.

Funerals don’t fix it. A eulogy covers five minutes of a life, the obituary covers less, and both get written in a week when nobody in the family is thinking clearly. A tribute book gives the person the room a funeral can’t, and it gives you and everyone else who loved them a reason to sit down together and remember out loud before the details fade.

Can a ghostwriter write a tribute book about someone who died?

Yes. A tribute book is a memoir written about somebody who can’t sit for the interviews, so the ghostwriter interviews everybody else.

The spouse, the children, the old business partner, the friend from the Army, the neighbor who shared a fence line for thirty years: each one holds a piece of the person that nobody else has.

Your ghostwriter’s job is to gather those pieces and build one person out of them. That takes the same skills as any memoir, plus one more: deciding whose memory wins when your aunt and your father remember the same afternoon differently. A good writer keeps both versions when the gap between them says something about the person, and picks one when it doesn’t. Either way, you get the final say.

You, or whoever in the family commissions the book, become the author. The book comes out under your name, or as a family project, and the ghostwriter stays invisible unless you choose to thank them. My article on writing a memoir as a gift covers how a book like this gets shared once it’s done.

Should I write a tribute book myself or hire a ghostwriter?

Write it yourself if you have the time, the stamina and a year in which grief leaves you room to work. (See also a planner that sorts ghostwriting from coaching)

Some people need to do it with their own hands, and a book written that way carries something no hired writer can supply.

Most people don’t have that year. You’re settling an estate, sorting a house, answering the same questions from relatives, and going back to a job that didn’t pause for your loss. Can you sit down every evening and write about the person you just lost? Can you interview your own mother about her husband without both of you falling apart? A lot of people can’t, and there’s no shame in it.

A ghostwriter solves a problem you haven’t noticed yet. You’re too close.

You know the story so well that you’ll skip the parts a grandchild needs explained, and you’ll leave out your own role because it feels like bragging. A writer from outside asks the questions a stranger would ask, and those are the questions your future readers have.

There’s a middle path too. Write the chapters you want to write yourself, the ones only you can tell, and have a ghostwriter handle the interviews with everyone else and stitch the book together. A book coach can guide you through the parts you write. You still end up with one book in one voice, and you’ve put your own hands on the parts that matter most to you.

Can a ghostwriter write a eulogy or obituary on short notice?

A writer can, but the clock changes everything.

A funeral happens within days or a week or two of a death. A eulogy has to be written, read aloud, revised and printed in that window, while you’re also choosing a casket and answering the phone.

A spoken eulogy runs five to ten minutes. At a normal speaking pace that comes to somewhere around 650 to 1,300 words. A writer can produce that from one long conversation with the family and a second short one to check facts and names. It has to be written for the ear, with short sentences the speaker can say without stumbling through tears. My piece on ghostwriting speeches explains how writing for the ear differs from writing for the page.

An obituary is shorter again and more formal. Newspapers charge for paid obituaries by length, so every line costs money, and funeral homes and online memorial sites have their own formats. A family can hand a writer the facts on Monday and approve an obituary on Tuesday.

My practice is books, so I’d point a family that needs a eulogy by Friday toward a speechwriter or a writer who takes quick-turn work.

The tribute book can wait until after the funeral, and it should.

If you’re the one standing up to give the eulogy, read it aloud at least twice before the service, once alone and once to somebody who’ll tell you where you stumbled. Mark the places where you’ll need to breathe. Print it in a large font, because your eyes won’t cooperate at the lectern, and bring a second copy for whoever will finish it if you can’t.

How long does a ghostwritten tribute book take?

Months, the same as any memoir. The interviews alone take weeks when you’ve given the writer six or eight people to talk to, and grieving people cancel sessions. Plan for it, and don’t treat your brother’s missed session as a problem.

Don’t try to finish a tribute book in time for the funeral. You’ll rush the people who knew the person best at the moment they’re least able to talk, and the book will show it.

Families who want something at the service can print the eulogy and a page of photographs. The book comes later.

A good target is the first anniversary of the death, or a birthday, or a family reunion the following summer. Deanna titled her memoir of the year after Tom died The Year of Firsts. Every family lives through those firsts, the first birthday and the first holiday without the person, and a tribute book finished inside that year gives them something to hold on one of those dates. My article on how long ghostwriting takes covers what drives the schedule.

What does a ghostwriter need from the family for a tribute book?

Everything the person left behind that still carries their voice, and a list of everybody who knew them well. Start collecting both now.

Voice is the part you’ll lose first. Your voicemails vanish when the phone plan is cancelled. Your home videos sit on a camcorder tape nobody can play anymore. Letters, emails, birthday cards with a line of handwriting, the notes in the margin of a cookbook: every one of those shows your ghostwriter how the person talked, and a book that sounds like them starts there.

If you have recordings or journals, my article on finishing a late parent’s memoir from journals and recordings explains how a writer works from that kind of material.

Who knew the person best? Who knew a side of them nobody else saw? Give the writer a list of those people, with a phone number and a line about how each one knew the person. Pick one person in your family as the point of contact, the one who answers the writer’s questions, settles disagreements and signs off on chapters. A tribute book with five family members approving every chapter gets stuck at chapter two.

Sort out permissions before your writer quotes anything. The estate controls the rights to what the person wrote. Letters other people wrote to them are a different matter: the family owns the paper, and the letter writer or their estate owns the words, so ask before quoting them at length. Photographs belong to whoever took them, and a studio portrait from 1962 still has an owner somewhere.

How does a ghostwriter handle grief during tribute book interviews?

Slowly, and by never forcing the painful part on the first try. Clients cry in interviews all the time, and a tribute book puts a grieving person in front of a stranger to talk about the one subject that hurts most. When it gets too heavy, I steer the conversation to something easy and unrelated, and we come back to it later, in the same session or the next one.

Your painful material will take several passes, and that’s normal. A recent client of mine wrote about a daughter killed suddenly about forty years ago. That subject took several passes over several sessions before it was on the page the way the client wanted it.

If forty years didn’t make that subject quick to write, a death six months old won’t be quick either.

Grief books go well once they’re moving, because the people telling the story want it told. When I offer to leave a hard subject out, nearly every client insists it goes in. My article on crying during a ghostwriting session explains why tears don’t stop an interview.

My wife Claudia died in 2005, after twelve and a half years of marriage. I don’t push a grieving family on a schedule, and no ghostwriter should.

A writer who treats your loss as a project delay has told you what kind of book you’d get.

Should a ghostwritten tribute book include the person’s flaws?

Yes. Nobody has a perfect life, and nobody who knew the person believes they did.

A tribute that turns a stubborn, funny, difficult man into a saint gives his grandchildren a stranger to remember.

Memoir clients drift toward one of two versions of a life: the hero, or the person who did everything wrong. I talk them back toward the middle, and a tribute book needs the same push. You’ll reach for the hero while the loss is fresh, and so will everyone you ask the writer to interview. Include his temper, his terrible jokes, the years he and his brother didn’t speak. Your readers will believe the praise once they’ve seen the flaws.

A tribute book is no place for revenge either. If the person’s life included a divorce, an estrangement or a business partner who wronged them, tell it with the same balance I’d push for in any memoir. The dead can’t sue, but the living people in the story can. Before you publish anything unflattering about a living person, have a lawyer read it, and read my article on writing about living people without getting sued.

Who is listed as the author of a ghostwritten tribute book?

You are, if you commissioned it, or your family is as a group. Common choices put a spouse or an eldest child on the cover, or credit the book to “The Family of” followed by the person’s name. Some families list everyone who contributed stories on an acknowledgments page, and I like that choice, because it tells the reader how many people it took to remember one person.

The ghostwriter’s name appears only if you want it to. Settle that in the contract, along with who owns the manuscript and who can print more copies later. A tribute book printed for thirty relatives this year gets asked for by grandchildren twenty years from now, so keep the files where the next generation can find them.

Decide early whether your book is private or public. A private print run for the family needs no ISBN and no marketing. A public book about a well-known local figure, a veteran or a business founder needs everything a published memoir needs, including a careful read for anything that names living people.

If someone in your family has died and their stories live only in the heads of the people who loved them, write down the names of those people this week, and gather the voicemails before a phone plan lapses. The Memoir Hub covers the rest of the memoir process, and my memoir process page explains how I work with families. Deanna gave her grandmother three books. The person you’re grieving deserves at least one.

From the author

The Ghostwriting Advantage
Someone you lost deserves care on the page. The Ghostwriting Advantage explains how a ghostwriter gets a tribute book written for you from the stories your family shares.

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