Technology
David Brewster
My book ghostwriting tools in 2021

Every now and then I’m asked about the various resources I use when I’m working on ghostwriting a book. These things change occasionally, so I thought it would be a good idea to share what I am using as my main book writing tools in 2021. So here they are: from recording interviews to organising to drafting to (almost) collaborating.

My book ghostwriting tools in 2021
Work Life
David Brewster
When to avoid showing your vulnerable side

Being willing to reveal a bit of yourself, especially through a bit of self-effacing humour, will lighten your text and give your readers something to connect to.

But this blog post is not about that sort of vulnerability.

No, this time I want to remind you of two of the less inspiring but just-as-important vulnerabilities every writer faces. Those vulnerabilities are backup and data security.

I was reminded recently about this by a rare computer crash that led to me losing a small amount of work. It wasn’t important and was easily recovered, but it could have been so much worse. Imagine losing a whole book to a hard drive crash!

When to avoid showing your vulnerable side
Write a book
David Brewster
No time, money or skill? You can still get your ...

If there’s one thing you learn from spending a chunk of your career in the world of books and writing, it’s that there are a lot of great stories out there. Personal stories of remarkable success against the odds. Business stories of risk taking and growth. Political stories of intrigue and persistence.

It would be great if all these stories could be told. As Spanish philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. Ideally, the stories would be recorded in books because books last. They go onto shelves and into libraries. They won’t disappear or become unreadable with new technologies.

Unfortunately, many terrific stories are never written down. Sometimes that’s because their owners don’t want to share them. Often

No time, money or skill? You can still get your book written
Reviews
David Brewster
The ghostwriter's nightmare scenario

Ghostwriter characters don't make it into fiction very often, but when they do they always seem to find themselves in jeopardy. 

In the 2010 Roman Polanski film The Ghost Writer, Ewan McGregor plays a ghostwriter working for a former British prime minister. In the end he knows too much and ... it doesn't end well. 

In the Netflix series House of Cards, Paul Sparks plays ghostwriter Thomas Yates who, after struggling to extract a decent memoir out of the president, fails to keep his professional distance, you might say. It takes a while – three seasons in fact – but it doesn't end well for him either.

And now we have Australian writer Richard Flanagan's latest novel, First Person, in which the narrator is a ghostwriter hired to author the memoir of a notorious conman. The story was inspired by Flanagan's own experience, very early in his career, of ghostwriting the autobiography of fraudster John Friedrich in 1991.

The ghostwriter's nightmare scenario
Writing
David Brewster
The joy of a good yarn

I love that my work as a ghostwriter gives me the opportunity to help people get their stories told. What I love even more is the fact that working on other people's stories gives me a front-row seat to those yarns.

Take Around the Grounds, for instance – a book that will be released by Finch Publishing on August 1. 

For this book I've been working with former ABC radio broadcaster Peter Newlinds. Peter's story is a celebration of sport, but from the spectator's side of the fence. This perspective gives the story a level of accessibility that most sporting memoirs, written as they are by former players, can't have. Few of us have the ability to play elite sport, but all of us are more than capable of joining in from the relative safety of the stands.

Of course we don't all have access to the commentary box as Peter did…

The joy of a good yarn

oxford dictionary

5 great places to go for advice on grammar

5 great places to go for advice on grammar

If you’re serious about your writing – and I mean any writing that is going to be seen by someone other than yourself – you should also be serious about getting your grammar right. This is the case even if you are of those who thinks grammar is overrated, that it’s ‘getting the meaning’ that matters. Remember that a good proportion of your readers will baulk at any grammatical error and will quite possibly lose focus on what you’re saying after they come across one. 

In any case, good writing is professional writing. If you want to present yourself as someone who knows their stuff, you need to be able to write about that stuff in proper English.

So, next time you are wondering about the rights and wrongs of semicolons or dashes, where should you go for help?

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Hurry Up and ... Slow Down

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Over forty years is a long time to work on a single task. Yet that has been the lot of the four editors of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. The massive 3,952 page double volume will be released this month, the culmination of the editors’ entire careers. In our world of fast, it is a timely reminder that, sometimes, good things need time. This new thesaurus has been pulled together almost entirely by hand. Words from past and present editions of the full dictionary were studiously transcribed onto slips of paper, then sorted, stacked and re-sorted into categories, sub-categories and sub-sub-categories, and finally put into historical context. Nearly a million words were sorted this way into quarter of a million categories. And, as I said, it took over 40 years.

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