How Do Ghostwriters Capture an Author’s Voice?

“What’s your process for capturing the author’s voice?”

I get this question on probably 9 out of 10 collaboration calls with prospects. I also get it from non-prospects who find ghostwriting a curiosity. And it’s a totally fair question.

So let’s pull the curtain back on the mystic art of writing in someone else’s voice.

A quick caveat: I can only speak to my own experience and methods. Other ghostwriters may have other successful methods, which is fine.

Where I think I have an edge is that my writing journey began in fiction, specifically theatre. I loved getting on a stage as a kid (a thought which largely horrifies me now), and in high school I started to dabble in playwriting, won a couple awards, and then went on to teach myself screenwriting.

You can’t be a good playwright or screenwright (is that a thing? it is now.) if you can’t write in someone else’s voice. Even in novels, good dialogue is essential—being able to separate characters by their word choices, tone, and mannerisms is key to good storytelling.

In many ways, this is my favorite aspect of ghostwriting because it taps into my creative writing/dialogue skills. So here’s how I do it…

Listen

This almost sounds too easy, but I assure you it’s not. I do my best to really listen to my clients on our content calls. Early on, whenever I sat down to write, I would play back the first couple minutes of the transcript to just listen to the author’s voice and get it in my head. I wanted to be able to “hear” their voice in my mind as I wrote. While I don’t need to do this as much now, it’s still a helpful exercise I use.

When I’m on a client call, I pay special attention to tone and body language. When does the author get most excited? I'll drop an * next to it. When do they say something super-insightful? Put a * next to it. This makes it easier for me to find when I review my notes later on and recall not just what they said, but how they said it.

I should note this is also why I won’t work with someone who just wants to dump material on me and says, “Turn this into a book.” I’ve done that before…and it’s impossible to capture the right tone and voice. Conversations are the foundation of my ghostwriting process. It always gets the best results.

Adjectives

You’d be surprised how often our voice comes down to one simple part of speech…adjectives. We all have our favorite adjectives (and adverbs, too, when necessary). Often, when I’m writing, I’m going off of my notes from the conversation and my memory. I do this because it makes the teaching more authentic…and also because trying to copy and paste from a transcript makes for bad writing.

So there’s a bonus tip for you…and a rookie mistake for ghostwriting: NEVER just copy and paste from the transcript and assume you’ll “capture” the author’s voice. Authors usually want to sound different on the page than how they talk in real life.

But back to adjectives.

Let’s say I write the phase: “Waiting to speak last in the meeting makes a huge difference in your team’s willingness to share and brainstorm.”

Then I go back to the transcript and realize, “Oh, wait…the author actually said ‘massive difference.’ She seems to like that word a lot. Also, she likes ‘if’ phrases a lot.”

So then I go in and “voice it up” by changing it to: “If you wait to speak last in meetings, it makes a massive difference in your team’s willingness to share and brainstorm.”

See how it alters the voice? Or rather, hear how it alters the voice?

I discovered this trick on one of my first big ghostwriting jobs. The author wrote me an email about a chapter to say, “It just doesn’t quite sound like me yet.” So I went back to the transcript, found his preferred adjectives, went over to the manuscript and literally changed only five or six sentences in the entire chapter. When he reviewed it again, he wrote back, “Yes, that’s perfect now!”

Adjectives for the win.

Examples & Analogies

You knew I had to get here eventually—storytelling itself. Anecdotes and examples are one of the BEST ways to capture an author’s voice.

For instance, I recently had an author who had a proclivity to share food and restaurant examples. During one call, he apologized for this and said, “Sorry, I know I talk about food a lot.”

I told him, “Don’t apologize at all! I love these examples…and it’s going to help me make this sound like you.”

Left to my own devices, I wouldn’t have used the food anecdotes and examples like he did. By incorporating his exact examples, it made the book sound just like him and made it a unique reading experience unlike other books in his niche which would have only used industry-specific examples. It set him apart and made the material more digestible (pun totally intended).

Likewise, I pay close attention to what the author likes to discuss. Another recent client LOVED golf. I mean, really really really loved golf. So I looked for opportunities in the manuscript to use golf references and analogies. Several of the analogies I used never came up in a discussion and he was impressed, saying, “I don’t remember saying this at all, but it’s exactly the sort of example I’d give.”

One of the BEST compliments I can get.

If you know the author is a cat person, then don’t use dogs as an analogy—use cats. It sounds obvious but new ghostwriters make this mistake often. I know I did, but after a few rounds, I learned to use the author’s likes and dislikes instead of my own, leading to less revisions later on.

Revisions & Collaboration

One of the great misunderstandings about ghostwriting is just how highly collaborative it is. Often when I send material over to an author, I’ll preface it by saying something like, “This is as far as I can go. I know it’s still missing something, I just don’t know what. Tell me what’s missing and let’s start tweaking it.”

I never get offended when an author edits my work, adds new material, or completely strikes out a sentence—or sometimes an entire paragraph. It’s THEIR book, after all. It needs to sound like them. It’s part of making sure the book sounds like them and helping them take more ownership of the writing process so they can authentically say “I wrote this book.”

In fact, I get excited when an author has the confidence to add in fresh thoughts in their own words—and then I go in and massage it for flow and clarity. I also ask them to do everything in “suggestion mode”—not because I don’t trust them but because it helps me better learn their voice, especially early on in the writing process. I pick up on their word choices, their preferred phrasing, and then apply what I learn to later chapters.

This is the magic ingredient for capturing voice. Multiple times, I’ve seen projects fall through because an aspiring author said, “It doesn’t sound like me. It doesn’t sound right.” But then they weren’t willing to take the time to provide the feedback necessary to make those changes and find the right voice and tone.

If you’re an aspiring author reading this, I hope this alleviates some anxiety around the ghostwriting process, whether it’s me or another ghostwriter you work with. If you’re an aspiring ghostwriter, then I hope this helps you skip over some of the early mistakes I made so you can produce fantastic work faster—and therefore, scale your business faster, too.

Reach out if you’ve got more questions—or schedule a 20-minute Q&A with me if you’d like to learn more about ghostwriting!

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