Hire a Professional Ghostwriter -- John DeSimone

Give me a few minutes to tell you why hiring a professional ghostwriter will transform your story into a top memoir or self-help book.

My name is John DeSimone and I’m a best-selling professional ghostwriter. I’m the author of two novels, and the ghostwriter of best-selling memoirs. Most memoirs are about some form of a journey. Your journey can be a growing up experience, family trauma, a business success, a unique solution you incorporated into your day to solve a problem or those of others.

Your journey has been a life full of lessons. You have had an interesting life and everyone tells you it would make a great story. But you don’t know where to start. That’s why you’re on this page. You need to a writer who knows the correct way to go about it.

If you’re like most people, now that you’ve decided to write a memoir, you want your story in experienced hands. You want your story in the hands of a wordsmith who can make your personality, with all your greatness and certitude, injury and healing, and vision and passion, come alive on the page.

You want to be vulnerable, but you don’t want to look like a fool. You want a book that represents you. But you don’t want mere words. You want your story, whether your life has been traumatic or victorious or both, to sound authentic.

Maybe you’re not expecting a writer to create a literary masterpiece out of your life story, but then, why not?

I can’t turn water into wine. But I can turn your words into a narrative that carries your voice. Voice is the sine qua non of all top memoirs. It’s that essential ingredient, the glue that holds all the other elements of the narrative in place. Whether your book is a personal memoir or a business memoir, voice matters. It’s what makes my books stand out. 

Voice is the spirit in the machine. When you pick up a memoir Voice is the undertow in the ocean breakers, compelling the swimmer into deeper waters. Voice perks our ears to someone who can’t be ignored. Or to someone who must be ignored. Voice transforms the colorless sky into a purpled twilight.

Why not expect more than mere words on a page? You can get software now to translate your words into a Word document. But a machine can’t capture your voice. It will never be able to capture your voice until it can empathize. When that happens, we’re all out of work.

So what is this voice I’m talking about?

• It’s your passion without the sentimentality.
• It’s the images in your head.
• It’s your experiences that show your character and emotions.
• It’s the unique way, the special way, you see the world.
• It’s your attitude, your convictions, your will to live.

This is why ghostwriting is so challenging and why you need a professional. Picking the right ghostwriter who will capture more than the words that come out of your mouth takes a special talent.

As a ghostwriter who specializes in memoirs, I believe what distinguishes a good writing job from a top memoir is the level of empathy of the professional you choose to write your book. It takes emotional intelligence to work through with you the tough parts of your narrative. Your memoir’s narrative must engage the reader emotionally.

Distilling a lifetime of experiences down to a meaningful narrative is one of the most difficult tasks facing a memoir writer. One writer compared writing about one’s life to distilling a field of corn down into a shot glass.

That image is useful because it implies several things: Writing your story is a process that takes time. It’s during this process of distilling down to the elemental truth of your story that your voice emerges, strong but vulnerable, honest but not foolish (unless the narrative calls for it).

I’ve spent my professional writing career listening to clients and figuring out the deeper meaning of their stories and then getting their story down on paper. One of my return clients said about my technique:

“John is an empathetic man with a fantastic ability to articulate thoughts and emotional processes on paper.”

Tim Chapman
CEO, Chapman House Recovery

Yes, I believe that the key to capturing and creating your literary voice is empathy. The ability of a professional ghostwriter to understand your emotional life and to articulate it is vital to the success of your book. That’s how I do it. That’s my process. I have no reservations about calling myself a professional ghostwriter.

If you are looking for someone to help you get your story fashioned into a compelling read, give me a call. I will give you a free evaluation of your story and an assessment of what I can do to help you reach your publishing goals.

Call me for a free evaluation. Or contact me directly.

My Five-Step Process for Writing a Memoir

My five-step ghostwriting process takes you from start to finish in eight months.

Listening and Learning

This is where I’m learning about you and your ideas. During our first month together, we talk through your story. I record every session and make a transcript that lays the foundation for the narrative. We’ll spend six to eight hours a week together–over the phone or in person.

Your story will be given the care and attention to detail that it deserves.

We all have governing scenes from our past that have deep emotional memories attached to them. These scenes may come up slowly or rise quickly through layers of memory as we talk through your story. I make extensive use of story arcs, and I take care to flesh out a meaningful emotional arc. 

Often in conversing with my clients, new insights into past events are gained. These become critical to developing your story. That’s why I spend a lot of time with my clients, recording every conversation, going over the stories and conversations in detail before I begin writing.

Drafting and Revising

Your book will now come to you in chapters. Here is where you will spend time reading it, making notes on the manuscript, and returning the pages for my revision.

One concern I often hear about using a ghostwriter is “Will it sound like me?” Hopefully, it won’t, at least not the spoken you. Most of us have a spoken voice that differs from our writing voice. If you’ve never written a book before, then a written voice needs to be developed.

But it will be your words, your ideas, your humor, and your vocabulary, for the most part.

Remember, what sounds interesting in speech typically won’t sound good on paper, so there has to be some shaping of the words, the ideas, the sentences to establish a voice that’s authentic to you. This is where my interviewing skills come into play—to dig deep into the story and the meaning behind the events.

When we’re done it won’t be my voice, neither will it be the spoken you, rather the literary you. One that is true to your energy and vocabulary and personality.

Peter Petre did this with Alan Greenspan’s The Age of Turbulence. If you’ve ever heard the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve speak he’s often obtuse. His language is usually riddled with financial jargon that sounds foreign to the average listener.

Petre took his ideas and words and shaped them into extremely readable prose. You can hear Greenspan’s voice for certain, but you can understand clearly what he means even when he’s speaking about the most complex economic mechanisms.

Sometimes a voice comes through in vocabulary; sometimes in the cadence of the speech.

You can read this in Jimmy Connors’ memoir, The Outsider. When Connors played tennis he had a pugilistic flair to his game. Reading the first page of his memoir brings that same aggressive staccato energy to bear. It’s him all right behind those words. I can feel the energy in the short sentences like he’s trying to punch me in the face with them.

Voice is a complex nuance to any written work, and I work hard to find yours. It’s a combination of sentence length, vocabulary, emotion, personality, and magic. When the written voice is working well, the story carries the reader away into an enjoyable experience.

Structure and Themes

Most memoirs are organized around a sequential series of events that move through conflict to some deeper problem, ultimately leading to some resolution. But there’s more. A memoir can also be organized around themes or both sequential events combined with themes.

Mary Karr in her famous memoir, The Liars’ Club, did this so adroitly. (Her book was not ghostwritten. If you write as beautifully as she did, you certainly don’t need me.) She organized her narrative simultaneously by themes and a sequence of events.

While she moved through her life from age five to college, each chapter is deepened emotionally by the development of her father’s drinking buddies and their penchant for telling tall tales. Hence the “Liars’ Club” of the title foreshadows the final scene where the ultimate lie unfolds.

It’s not what we’re expecting, but it has been hinted at, so we’re not surprised. The theme has been so carefully developed that we’re ready for it, and we know by now it’s not a tall tale.

All top memoirs have a well-defined story arc. The arc of the story  is the process of change, maturing, or transformation that you experience. It’s the inner story.

During this structuring phase we’ll decide on the different narrative devices we can use to tell your story. This is part of the process of developing an outline with chapter summaries.

For instance in Drew Barrymore’s, Little Girl Lost, the writer used both first and third person point of view within each chapter. This dual narrative allowed the ghostwriter to dive into her family’s past that bore directly on Drew’s decisions and the situation in the present. This created empathy for Drew and suspense over what would become of her.

We’ll also identify the essential conflicts and the crisis of each chapter. Chapters progress through conflict that somehow changes the value (emotion or state of mind or situation) of the author. This builds interest because the reader will want to know more.

This change in value creates the character arcs every good story possesses. Changes should result from something you did or was done to you. Another way of thinking of this is that all change and growth comes through the decisions and events in the author’s life. This gives you new insights into what matters to you—a business breakthrough, professional achievement, relationships, sobriety—whatever you are striving for.

I’ll incorporate all of these elements into the outline that gives direction to writing a memoir. It will serve as a guide, not a rulebook, as the story unfolds.

All Top Memoirs Have Strong Story Arcs

A character or story arc incorporates the key or pivotal moments of your journey. The story arc defines the pivotal moments of change, of transformation, of awareness, of mistakes, and of lesson’s learned. A professional ghostwriter knows how to listen to your story, identify them, and shape them into a story that produces a page turning reading experience.

Revising and Copy Editing

At last, you will receive a completed manuscript. You will read it one more time in its entirety, make comments on it, and then send it back.

After I’ve made the last round of revisions, I will send it to a copyeditor. I work with a professional copyeditor to smooth out the prose and to proofread the text. A pair of fresh eyes will tighten it and give it the final polish. That’s what makes it publication ready.

After the book is copyedited, I make corrections and send it back to you for a final review.

My clients are happy because I deliver a book they can be proud of, one that demands to be read. Once we have completed writing your memoir, we can consider the publishing options. Writing a memoir is difficult enough, that’s why I make the publishing options easy to understand.

For more information on my ghostwriting services go here.

Publishing Options

Indie Publishing

While the book is in copyediting, I’ll help you sift through the publishing options. There are a wide variety of self-publishing options available and if you decide to self-publish your book, I’ll be happy to assist in evaluating your options and make a fully informed decision that works for you.

Traditional Publishing Option

If you seek to publish using a traditional publisher, you will need a professional Book Proposal. Most literary agents will not consider your book without receiving a Book Proposal. For an additional fee, I can write a Book Proposal that will get your project immediate attention.

If you are looking for a professional ghostwriter to help you write a memoir, I will assist you in every step of the submission process to literary agents.

Call me for a free evaluation.