My friends, Lee’s Anti-bilious pills are excellently adapted to carry off superfluous bile, restore and amend the appetite, produce free perspiration, and thereby prevent constipation, lumbago, softening of the brain and Bronze John fever. They’re celebrated for removing habitual costiveness, dropsy, and severe headaches, and ought to be taken by all persons on a change of climate. When the West was wild and social media was still 150 years away, snake oil salesmen rambled from town to town hawking their mystery potions, capable of curing everything that ailed ya. They stood on their rickety platforms and were masters at closing sales. Even before they rolled into town, destitute farmers lined…
-
-
Writing What They Meant to Say Why ghostwriters often struggle with their clients' voices
“What is this rubbish? I don’t talk like that! Y’all need to go back and re-write the whole dang thing. Make it sound more like me, or I ain’t gonna pay ye.” And, so went the opening volley of comments from my newest ghostwriting client after he read my first draft of his book. It was our first time working together and it became immediately apparent that we had a long road ahead of us. Or, as Desi Arnaz once said, I had a “lot of splainin’ to do.” As a professional ghostwriter, I’m in the enviable position of telling other people’s intimate stories, capturing their thoughts and emotions, digesting…
-
How to Remember People’s Names A simple, yet effective way to gain people's respect
Way back in the 1970s, I stood at a fork in the road: should I go to college, or begin trudging down the path to a lifetime career? I did neither. Instead, I spent the winter teaching skiing at a popular ski resort just to get the adventure out of my system. As a full-time ski instructor, I taught two classes a day, each with twelve to fifteen students. That meant learning over a hundred new names a week… and remembering them. While other instructors caved into assigning deprecating monikers like, “Ms. Can’t Turn Left,” or “Mr. Sits Down When He Goes Too Fast,” I chose a more complimentary approach…
-
What Makes a Successful Writer? Everything you need to be able to do besides write
The scene opens with the haggard writer hunched over a dilapidated Underwood, struggling to meet his midnight deadline. The air is stale and thick with cigarette smoke and there’s an empty bottle of scotch lying on the floor. By the smell of things, it’s obvious he hasn’t slept, eaten or washed his clothes in over a week. That was the Hollywood image of writers before the information highway arrived in the early 1990s. Since then, the business of writing has changed in more ways than anyone could have possibly imagined in 1939. These days, a writer’s job doesn’t end when they drop their query down the out-bound chute at the…
-
15 Questions Your Ghostwriter Should Be Asking You And other tips for finding the right person to write your book
What do a Labrador Retriever, a poor Southern tobacco farmer, and a World War II survivor[1] have in common? If you guessed nothing, you’d be wrong. In fact, each was the basis of a best-selling book. Two of them even went on to become Hollywood box office smashes. The world we live in is a fascinating place, filled with thousands of entertaining stories. Some, like those of World War II survivors, will soon be gone—lost forever. Wouldn’t you like to make sure that your story isn’t? If so, you need to write a book! “Sure,” you say. “It’s easy for you to say. You’ve written books and know how to…
