Ghostwriting Is Impersonation With a Deadline.

I have been paid to be other people for thirteen years.

Not in a fun way. Not in a Daniel Day-Lewis way.

In a "this is due Thursday and the client hates adverbs" way.

That's ghostwriting. Everybody describes it as writing for someone else, which is wrong, and the wrongness is why most ghostwriting is bad. You are not writing for them. You are writing AS them. There is no version of this job where your taste gets to sit in the passenger seat and offer directions.

You have to disappear.

The part nobody warns you about

Here's the thing.

The hard part of ghostwriting is not the writing. If you can write, you can write. The hard part is that you have to like somebody enough to sound like them.

Not agree with them. Like them.

You have to find the thing about how this person talks that you actually enjoy, the specific crooked way their brain turns a corner, and then build the whole piece on top of it. If you can't find that thing, you will produce something technically correct and completely dead, and everyone will read it and say "this is great, thanks," and nobody will ever feel anything.

Contempt shows up in copy. Every time.

I have written as a beer brand, a soda, an oatmeal, a bank of executives, a cognac, and a convenience store. Some of those voices came easily. Some took weeks of me sitting there going "no, they wouldn't say that, they'd say the dumber version of that," which is often the correct note.

The dumber version is usually the human one. Write that down.

Voice is not adjectives

Ask a brand what their voice is and you get a list. Bold. Approachable. Confident. Witty but never silly.

Cool. Nobody has ever written a single usable sentence from that list.

Because voice isn't adjectives. Voice is a set of decisions, and you can only see them in motion. It's sentence LENGTH. It's whether this person says "we" or "I." It's whether they land the joke or leave it half-said. It's the words they would never use, which matter more than the words they love.

When I take on a voice, I'm not looking for a vibe. I'm looking for rules.

Does this person use questions? How often do they contradict themselves inside one paragraph? Do they apologize before a strong opinion or after it? Do they say "so" at the start of a sentence, and would they be horrified to know it?

Three or four rules like that and you can write a hundred things. A page of adjectives and you can't write one.

How I actually do it

Since I promised useful and not just moody.

Read them out loud. Not skim. Out loud, in your own mouth. Take everything they've written or said, emails, transcripts, that one rambling Slack message where they got annoyed, and speak it. Your ear will find the pattern about forty times faster than your eyes will. You'll hit a line and feel your mouth do something unfamiliar. That thing your mouth just did? That's the voice.

Hunt the flaws, not the highlights. Everyone hands you their polished stuff. Their keynote. Their published article. That is the LEAST useful material, because it has already been sanded down by three other people. Ask for the unedited thing. The voice memo. The first draft they were embarrassed by. That's where the person is.

Find the one word they'd never say. Every voice is defined by its negative space. Once you know the forbidden words, you have a fence, and inside the fence you can run.

Write the bad version on purpose. First pass, do them as a caricature. Overcook it. Push every tic until it's ridiculous. Then dial it back about 30 percent and you'll land almost exactly on them, because caricature finds the load-bearing features fast.

Then get out of the way. Read your draft and kill anything you're proud of for your own reasons. That clever line? Would they have written it? No? It's gone. I don't care how much you love it. Save it for your own work.

That last one is the whole job, honestly. Ghostwriting is a discipline of deletion.

What it costs

I'm not going to pretend this is free.

You do this for enough years and you get very, very good at sounding like other people, and one morning you sit down to write something with your own name on it and you can't find the frequency. You reach for the voice and there are nineteen of them in there and none of them are yours.

That's real. Most career copywriters I know have hit it.

The fix isn't mystical. You just have to keep a thing that is only yours and write in it on purpose, badly, regularly, where no client can reach it. For me that's been fiction and the books, which is also the least commercially sensible hobby a person can have and I recommend it to everyone.

You need a room where nobody is paying you. Otherwise the muscle atrophies.

And yes, the machine does this now

Obviously somebody is going to say it, so I'll say it first.

AI is genuinely good at imitation. Feed it enough samples and it will produce something that sounds broadly like a person. That is not a hot take, that is Tuesday.

Here's what it doesn't do.

It doesn't know which parts of the voice are the PERSON and which parts are just habit. It can't tell you that the exec says "at the end of the day" because he's stalling, and that the real sentence is the one after it. It has no instinct for what this person would say in a room they have never been in before, which is exactly what a ghostwriter is hired to figure out.

Imitation is pattern. Voice is judgment.

So the tool drafts, and I flinch, and I cut. Same as always. The flinch is the thing I'm actually selling.

The compliment you never get

The best review a ghostwriter gets is silence.

Nobody says "great writing." Nobody says "loved the rhythm in paragraph four." The person just reads it and goes "yeah, that's what I meant," slightly annoyed, like you stole it from their head.

That's the win. That's the entire scoreboard.

You can see the brands I've disappeared into if you want the receipts, and you'll notice not one of them sounds like this page. Which is sort of the point.

Now if you'll excuse me, somebody needs to sound confident by Thursday.

Probably me, as somebody else. 😘