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

draft

Overcoming writer's block – Part one

Overcoming writer's block – Part one

Recently I was helping one of my daughters with an English essay she was writing. She’s a terrific creative writer, but can get stuck from time to time – as we all do. As it turned out, I was a fairly stuck myself on one of my own pieces of ghostwriting work. And, as so often happens, helping someone else was just what I needed to help me realise the error of my own ways.

Between the two of us, my daughter and I had become bogged down in two of the most common quagmires a writer can find themselves in.

I’ll deal with one of these forms of block this week, and the other next time.

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Write and publish your book in a year – Step 4: Writing tips

Write and publish your book in a year – Step 4: Writing tips

No one – well, hardly anyone – drafts a whole book in a month. So at this stage on your journey I’d like to remind you of a few of things you can be keeping in mind as you write, and give you a couple of new things to think about.

Once you get into the swing of writing, it is easy to become buried in what you know and lose sight of what you want your book to achieve. It pays to constantly check yourself by revisiting the three major considerations raised previously:

  • Who is your audience? Who is this book for? Who will be reading it? How much do they already know about your topic?

  • What is your message? What is the single main thing you want to say with this book?

  • What is your purpose? What are you aiming to achieve with his book?

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Write and publish your book in a year – Step 3: Draft

Write and publish your book in a year – Step 3: Draft

You’re two months into this non-fiction book-writing project and if you’ve been keeping up*, you should now have in front of you a reasonable outline of your book. Will that be the final outline? It might be, but it might not. At this point, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you have some form of skeleton on which you can now start adding some meat.

By now you may have noticed a bit of a theme running through these ‘Write your book’ posts. For both collecting and outlining I was keen to emphasis the need for a Nike approach: ‘Just do it’. That same approach applies to drafting.

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Write and publish your book in a year – Step 2: Outline

Write and publish your book in a year – Step 2: Outline

In the previous post in this series, I set you a goal of collecting as much of your ‘stuff’ as you could, in either physical or digital form, or a mixture of the two. With that done, you can move on to outlining your book.

You’ve got a pile of stuff. Now what will you write about?

The act of collecting together all that you know about ‘your’ topic can be quite daunting. Your ‘pile’ of information is probably quite a lot higher than you thought it might be. Which can create a problem. How to convey all that in the space of a couple of hundred pages?

The answer lies in understanding that your book should not aim to be a ‘tell all’. In other words, you don’t need to – indeed shouldn’t aim to – fit everything you know into this single book. This can be difficult for the first-time author to come to grips with but it is very important. 

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