There's a particular kind of person I work with a lot. They're accomplished. They're thoughtful. They've built something real, or lived through something significant, or developed a perspective on their industry that genuinely deserves an audience. And when I ask them to tell me about it, they look at me like I've asked them to solve a math problem in a foreign language.

It's not 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, rich, hard-won, but it lives inside them in a way that hasn't been organized into a narrative yet. It's feeling and instinct and memory, not sentences.

That's not a flaw. That's just what expertise actually 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 in the room changes everything.

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. The stories underneath the story you're used to telling — those are almost always the ones worth writing.

And here's what I find again and again: the people who walk in convinced they don't have enough to say walk out of our first session realizing they have more than they know what to do with.

You probably do too.