“I mean, I know my whole marketing team is really excited about the possibility of a book, I just don’t know what I have to say that people would read…” 

Her voice trailed off, ending in a cliffhanger of doubt. “Yeah, we’re going to write a great book together,” I thought to myself and smiled. I couldn’t help it. I’d heard this before, and felt a rush of confidence in the woman staring back at me through our pixelated Zoom call. 

You see, there's a particular kind of person I work with a lot. 
They're accomplished, thoughtful, and usually tend to sell themselves short.
Their innate ambition has led them places others have only talked about. 

They've developed a perspective on their industry that truly deserves an audience. And when I ask them to tell me about it, they have to recollect their thoughts - as if remembering, “Oh yeah, not everyone knows this stuff.” And there it is - the beginning of discovering their voice.

I wouldn’t call this impostor syndrome, exactly. It's something more specific than that.

The people who have the most interesting things to say are often the ones who have been so busy doing the work that they've never had to translate it into words. The experience is all there, layered and rich, but it lives inside them in a way that hasn't been organized into a narrative yet. It's feeling and instinct and memory and snippets of past conversations, not sentences.

It’s what expertise looks like from the inside.

The other thing I've noticed is that the more someone knows about a subject, the harder it is for them to imagine what it would be like not to know it. They skip the parts that seem obvious to them - which are often the exact parts that would fascinate everyone else. The origin story they've told a hundred times starts to feel stale and unimportant, even when it's the thing a reader would find most compelling.

This is why having someone else guide the thought process is so critical!

A good ghostwriting conversation isn't an interview in the traditional sense. It's more like an excavation. I'm listening not just for what you say but for what you almost say, what you gloss over, what you mention offhandedly that makes me want to stop and ask you to go back. 

I’m about to hop off the Zoom call when my client -- and soon-to-be published author -- says, “I think I really can do this. I didn’t realize how much I knew!” We both end the conversation knowing this is just the beginning.