How my role as a writer-for-hire helps me finish my own creative work
As a natural health ghostwriter, copywriter, and coauthor for the past twenty years, I’ve met incredible people I wouldn’t have met any other way. I’ve learned about new scientific and medical research and translated the findings for the general public. What a privilege to work as a ghostwriter for doctors with health-changing insights and individuals with fascinating survival stories!
In addition to the personal stories and medical gleanings, I’ve also learned so much about the writing craft itself. I’ve certainly learned what it takes logistically to complete a 60,000- to 90,000-word manuscript on a tight timeline. Whether non-fiction informational books or inspirational memoirs, all my ghostwriting projects have also taught me valuable lessons that carry over to my own creative writing projects.
Lately, while keeping my client projects on track, I’m also working on a memoir of my own. I’m learning how to take my own author-coaching advice! Here are 5 hard-won insights that I share with all my authors… and they’re now ringing true for my own project:
1. First draft is an interview with yourself. Just as a good reporter does not typically interrupt their interview subject, do your best to not “interrupt” your initial free-writing with self-editing. Early drafts are allowed to be stream-of-consciousness, disorganized, and circular. This is the time for embryonic ideas and messy thought. This body of rough material is the mass of clay that you will use to build the book later. For now, just get the material out there.
2. Don’t stay in “first draft land” forever! The raw uncensored creativity of draft-writing feels so good, so freeing. But at some point, if you want to publish, you must think of a future reader. Purely self-expressive writing, the type we pour into a diary, rarely connects well with readers. To write well, we have to craft stage-setting lines, fashion a clever hook, build framing and transitions, include detailed sensory description that helps the reader feel like they’re in the scene or lets them fully absorb an informational passage.
At some point, you’ll need to look at your draft material with a sculptor’s eye. A surprising amount of material will be shaved off during that sculpting (content editing) process. This hurts at first, but eventually begins to feel liberating: That scene isn’t working? Maybe it’s not meant to be. What happens if I simply remove it instead of endlessly trying to fix it?
Come out of First Draft Land, and pick up a red pen and scissors. Begin content removal, and watch for gaps too—areas that require new content. This revision work is the hard part. Anyone can write. Authors revise.
3. Craft a solid trellis. Contrary to popular belief, structure does not kill creativity. But writing with no sense of direction can stymie any project. I have seen talented writers burn out in the midst of their opposition to structure. Think of the book structure as an airy wire framework underpinning a large-scale sculpture. The creative work still has incredible freedom in how it attaches to and extends out from that framework. If you do it right, the framework will be invisible to anyone looking at the final work. But its role is crucial: Structure prevents the written work from collapsing into an undefinable mass on the floor!
Storyboards, spreadsheets, multi-page lists, book-organizing apps, sticky notes covering a wall, and conventional Roman numeral outlines all qualify as book-structuring tools. Whatever tool you use, develop your structural sketch and use it regularly to make content-development choices during the revision phase.
In my memoir writing workshops, I often start my classes with: “This is your book, but it’s no longer about you.” Your book is really about the connection it makes with its readers. To connect, all those wild free-written thoughts need to find their place within a structured intelligible whole. Organization and structure help your reader follow your thoughts, digest them, and possibly even embrace those thoughts as their own.
4. The 80/20 rule applies to pretty much everything in the writer’s journey. For instance, I’ve found that almost 80 percent of my time in a given week is dedicated to business-related tasks, 20 percent to actual writing. Of course, that balance shifts during times of deadline crunch—when writing or editing become my sole focus for ten-hour days for several weeks on end. But those times are countered by other seasons when I’m focused solely on a marketing campaign, educational conference, or a networking event, spending ten-hour days focused primarily on platform-building.
Similarly, when I look at the entire time-allocation of a writing project, about 20 percent of my time is spent in the raw draft-writing phase, and 80 percent is focused on revision and fine-tune editing. Again, anyone can write. Authors revise. Ultimately, be aware that free-form expressive writing is a rarity and a delight. When you commit to completing a book-length project, you sign up for thousands of tasks that don’t look or feel like writing. All are valuable. All are required to ensure that your final work connects with its readers.
5. It takes a team to craft and publish a book. This is wildly obvious when I work on a fast-turnaround, team-written project, with multiple writers divvying up chapters and passages, all writing simultaneously to ensure we deliver the final file on time. Robust teamwork is also crucial for the solitary author writing their own memoir. That’s my situation; I don’t have a ghostwriter for my memoir. I’m the only one churning out raw draft-material. But for this manuscript to become publication-ready, I’ll involve a team of other experts.
I have my own coach and developmental editor. They were involved in the idea germination stage, and I will continue to involve them in the content-editing and revision phases. When a first readable draft is complete, the manuscript will head to a line editor and then a copyeditor. Then beta readers (test readers) will provide even more feedback.
During those lonely periods when I am “without the manuscript” because it is in the hands of an editor or beta reader pool, I’ll be building my marketing team. (Actually, I’m already doing some of that platform-building right now.) This includes working with web developers, social media experts, and possibly a publicist. At a more grass roots level, I’ll cultivate new connections with potential book advocates on social media and in the real world of one-to-one friendship.
Finally, with this particular manuscript, I’ll need an agent to help secure a publisher—connecting me with yet another team of book industry experts. Self-publishing would not insulate me from all this teamwork. If anything, successful self-published authors find that success through building their own team of book marketing supporters. The more bootstrapped the initiative, the more time and energy the author spends on team-building.
Yes, it takes a team. Raw draft-writing and initial revisions are ideally pursued alone in our private writing caves. But as soon as we step out into the world with those draft pages in hand, the team-building begins.
Anika Hanisch is a ghostwriter who primarily serves practitioners in the natural health world and individuals with unique survivor/thriver stories. Take some time to learn more about her genre preferences, then contact her about involvement in your next book!