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Why You Need to Write Your Memoir

A story.

In 1943, when my grandmother, Margarita, was 34, she was living in Bandung, Indonesia with her husband, 12-year-old daughter, and newborn son. At the time, Indonesia was a Dutch colony, but the Indonesian government agreed to let the Japanese army use their islands as a base if they would get rid of the colonizers. So the Japanese rounded up all the Dutch women and put them into internment camps; they put all the Dutch men into work camps.

Margarita’s husband, Wilhelmus, was placed into one of the men’s camps where they were put to work building infrastructure for the Japanese. Do you know the movie, “The Bridge On The River Kwai“? According to family history, Wilhelmus was one of the prisoners forced to build that.

My grandmother, Margarita Blankevoort Binning. I wish I could have written her memoir.
One night, Japanese soldiers showed up to take my grandmother into the women’s camp. In a panic, she grabbed a set of coffee spoons, two left shoes, and a bassinet holding her 3-week-old son.

There were 108,000 Dutch women and children put into internment camps on Java, Sumatra, Borneo, and Timor. My grandmother was one of them; fortunately, her newborn son — my father — was not.

She was taken to a way station camp, a clearinghouse, where she would be sorted and sent to a different camp in the area.

Internees were held in more than 350 camps across the Far East. In the internment camps conditions were severe. Food and clothing were generally in short supply and facilities were basic. Conditions varied according to the location of the camps. Those on mainland China fared relatively well, but conditions in the Netherlands East Indies were among the worst and casualties from disease and malnutrition were high.

— A Short History Of Civilian Internment Camps In The Far East

She had been there for two days when she stopped producing the milk her son needed, which meant he had nothing to eat. She told me once, “He never cried. He just opened his mouth to try to nurse, but there was nothing for him.”

So Margarita went to the camp commander and said, “You need to send my son away. There’s nothing for him to eat.”

“Where do you want me to send him?” the commander asked.

“I don’t care,” said Margarita. “He’ll die if he stays here. Please send him away and save his life. At least if he’s not here, he can survive.” She decided she would rather give up her son so he could live than to keep him with her until he died.

That night, more soldiers showed up at the house where her daughter was staying and said, “Come with us.” No explanation, no details. Just, “come with us.”

Her daughter, who was also named Margarita, had a German father, so she had not been taken into the camp with her mother. Instead, she was living with a German woman. And since Japan and Germany were allies, the Japanese soldiers left German citizens alone.

The soldiers escorted young Margarita to the camp, where she was taken to a fence where my grandmother met her. They didn’t speak, neither of them said a word. She just handed her 3-week-old baby over the fence to her daughter and then turned and walked away, still never saying a word. She spent the night shattered and sobbing, refusing to forgive herself for what she had done, frantic about what would become of her son.

Two years later, when the camps were liberated, she was reunited with her two children and her husband, and they left Indonesia and returned to the Netherlands. She later moved to the United States, and my father was 9 years old when he moved to the U.S.

My grandmother, Margarita Blankevoort, at age 36.
My grandmother told me that story, and several others, as I was growing up.

Stories about how thieves blew sleeping powder under the door of their house and then stole all of their furniture in the night. Stories about how Indonesian militia massacred a convoy of Dutch women and children on their way to a Dutch harbor. How she and her children were supposed to be in that convoy, but couldn’t make it, so they went a day later.

She told me stories about growing up in Chile, her life in The Netherlands, her life in Indonesia, and her time in the United States as a young mother.

She’s gone now, passed away at 101, so I can’t ask her questions or learn more of her stories. It’s something I wish I could have spent more time doing, learning stories I could pass on to my kids and grandkids. They never met her, and now they’ll never know her stories.

I can tell them the stories that I know. I could even write them down, but they would be vague generalities and broad sweeps culled from memories of half-heard tales, not rich details.

We have forgotten our great-grandparents. Our great-grandchildren will forget us.

What are your stories? What are the cool, dramatic, exciting, or emotional things that happened to you in your past? What are the life lessons you want to pass on to your kids and grandkids? Would you like your great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren to know who you are?

We have forgotten the fourth generation before us. Many of us — nearly all of us — have never met our great-grandparents. I’ll bet you don’t even know their names.

And our great-grandchildren will never know us. They won’t know our names, what we did, what lessons we taught our own kids. Any stories they hear about us will be mostly forgotten, half-heard, and lacking the rich detail of the original storyteller.

This is why writing your memoir is critical to preserving your life story and leaving a legacy for the people who come after you.

A memoir is more than just your autobiography. More than “This is my life and what happened to me.”

A memoir is your story of “these are the lessons I learned in my life.”

You can pass your memoir on to your family and friends so they know what you stood for and what you accomplished in your life. They’ll know your history, both good and bad, and they’ll remember you for generations to come.

I’m now working on a book about how to write your own memoir, so if you’re interested in hearing more about it, leave a comment or email me, and I’ll let you know when it’s finished.

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How to Find Your Client’s Voice as a Writer

If you’re a ghostwriter or freelance writer, it can be difficult to find your client’s voice. It’s not as important if you’re only doing a small one-off project like an email, but it’s critical if you’re ghostwriting a book, a speech, or a series of blog articles for a corporation.

Here are a few ways you can find your client’s voice, and one secret to finding it when the client doesn’t even know what their voice should be.

1. Listen to how they talk

You should not — absolutely never — just start writing without talking to your client. You’ll want to do a discovery call at least, to find out what the client wants and to identify your scope of work.

More importantly, you want to talk with the person whose name is going to go on the work. That means if you’re writing for a CEO, make sure you talk with the CEO. Not their staff, not their go-betweens. Your client may have a certain turn of phrase or favorite word they use, and you want to know what they are; the go-betweens will not.

Several years ago, I helped the CEO of a Fortune 500 insurance company ghostwrite his book on CEOs and social media. We met in his (gorgeous!) office to talk about the project, and he said a few words and phrases that I came to learn were his way of talking. He used, not bigger words per se, but unusual words — like “per se.”

I wrote those in my handy-dandy Moleskine notebook to refer to later. They actually never came up again, but it helped me understand that he chose his words carefully and had a particular speech pattern, so I needed to remember to follow it when I turned his words into text. We also spoke by phone every two weeks, so I was exposed to his speaking style more and more.

Also, he and his social media director noticed my note-taking and commented on it. They said they felt good about their choice because I was clearly conscientious. I had never thought of it that way, but who am I to turn down accidental recognition?

So, always take note of the little speech patterns your client has. Whether they know it or not, they have them and will feel good that you recognized it.

Plus, even if you never refer to it again, it makes you look like you know what you’re doing.

2. Read your client’s past work

This is what they think they sound like. It may be conversational, or it may be instructional. It may be light and airy or it may be serious and business-like. It may have a lot of second-person references — “what would you do?” — or it may be cold and impersonal — “Apply the lotion liberally to one’s epidermis and return it to the basket.”

Make sure you read a lot of your client’s work, because their regular ghostwriters may have changed over time. Or they use a lot of different writers all at once, which may allow for a little more flexibility. Still, all those writers may have a similar voice as well, so follow the crowd.

3. Ask them what they think their voice is

Make sure you can match up what they think their voice is and what you’ve read and heard. Maybe they say they want to be friendly and approachable, but their past work reads like it was written by a child-hating robot.

Or they want to have a tone and voice that conveys seriousness and stability, but they can’t stop sounding conversational.

Ultimately, what they tell you what they want is what you should strive for, but you should also feel confident enough to point out the inconsistency. Just say, “I understand you want X, but your past work sounds more like Y. Are you changing from your past voice?”

If they don’t agree with your assessment and they think their written work sounds like their desired voice, and that you don’t know what you’re talking about, do two things:

1) Try to match their past work rather than what they tell you. They think the past work sounds like their desired voice, so they’re looking for that. Let them tell you otherwise.
2) Make sure you get paid upfront.

4. The secret to finding a client’s voice when they don’t know what it is

What do you do when your client doesn’t have a voice, or when they’re not really good?

Years ago, I was an aspiring speechwriter and was asked to write a speech for a candidate for the U.S. Congress in my home district.

The candidate was running unopposed in our party’s primary because no one wanted to run against the opposition incumbent as he always won. Still, she needed the backing of all our party’s county chairmen, 12 in all, and she was in danger of not getting it.

She had given a speech at a district dinner that was a 45-minute vomit of anything she could think of; she was supposed to speak for 10 minutes on healthcare.

I got a call from my own county chair telling me that this woman needed major help, and could I help her with her speech? If she blew it again, the party wasn’t going to back her at all. They would rather run nobody that year than endorse her. So my speech was going to make or break her candidacy.

No pressure.

I called the candidate and we chatted on the phone for nearly an hour. She was really nice and fun to talk to, and she told me about her views. I took notes, but she rambled and I wasn’t sure what she actually wanted to cover or how she was supposed to say it. She didn’t have a voice in particular unless it was just one long, rambling sentence.

But I knew about this trick, and I thought I’d better use it.

I knew her speech had to be under 10 minutes, which equaled 1,000 words. That’s because the average person speaks between 100 – 150 words per minute. And she spoke a little fast, but I wanted to make sure she didn’t go over. So, 100 words x 10 minutes = 1,000 words.

I hit the three major points she wanted to hit, and stuck only to the important information without all the little tangents and tidbits she had shared during our call.

And, most importantly — and this is the big secret! — I wrote in short, punchy sentences, like a newspaper writer. Why? Because we all like to think we speak that way, at least when giving speeches. We all like to think we give speeches that are easy to hear, easy to read, and use lofty, soaring language about big ideas.

So I wrote short, punchy sentences about the big ideas.

When the dinner came, she gave the speech, and everyone loved her. Best speech of the night, very inspiring, blah blah blah, and the county chairmen all agreed unanimously to support her candidacy for the Congressional race.

(Narrator: She got 33% of the vote, just like every other candidate had ever done in that district.)

After she got home, she called me and gushed about the speech. “It was great. Everyone loved it, and you captured my voice perfectly!”

Well, no, I captured my voice perfectly. That was already my writing style, so I just wrote to my strength. It just happened to be the style that most people prefer to speak in.

I didn’t tell her this, of course, because that would be dumb.

Instead, I wrote several more speeches for her throughout her campaign, all using the same short, punchy style. And she rocked it. People loved her speeches and she was able to make her points without confusion or droning on.

All because I wrote in “her” voice.

Final thoughts

When writing for a client, you absolutely need to do everything you can to find their voice. Record them talking, have conversations with them, take notes in a notebook, and read their past works.

But if all else fails, write short, punchy sentences in the same way a newspaper writer would do it. If you don’t know what that sounds like, read Ernest Hemingway’s Big, Two-Hearted River.

It’s a short story, about 7,00 words, written at a 3.4-grade reading level, and has 17 adverbs in it. It’s my favorite Hemingway story and one that I model my own writing style after.

Write in that manner because it’s what people think they sound like when they give speeches. And it’s the way they think they write.

If you can capture your client’s voice, they’ll be happy, and they’ll keep you coming back for more.

And if they piss you off, just make them sound like a drunk pirate instead.

Photo credit: Caleb Oquendo (Pexels, Creative Commons 0)

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The Code of the Ghostwriter

Being a ghostwriter means following an unwritten code of ethics and practices.

(Or at least, we wrote it down, but like most ghost articles, no one knows who did it, so we can’t find it.)

Ghostwriters need a code of ethics and practices they live by. A short list of things we’ll do and not do in service of our clients. Based on my own work as a ghostwriter, as well as talking to other ghosts, these are the four main tenets of our profession.

1. Ghosts are heard, but never seen.

You may read our work, but you’ll never know it was us. The ghost writer is there to attach the words to someone else’s stories. The sports star who spins a good yarn, but can’t write a grammatical sentence to save his life. The politician who’s too busy to spend six or eight hours a day writing down her life. The CEO who spends 14 hours a day running a global company, but doesn’t have time to send emails, let alone write a 200 page book.

So the ghostwriters do it. We don’t talk about it, we don’t get credit, we don’t get mentioned at awards time. Sure, we might get a small mention in the foreword, but it’s pretty rare for people to know who the ghost is. Some won’t even admit it, like whoever wrote Snooki Polizzi’s books.

2. Ghost writers should charge a fair price.

The price you charge needs to be fair to other writers as well as your clients. If you undercut your prices, and do the work for 20% less than your competition charges, you’re not only hurting yourself by leaving money on the table, you’re hurting the entire industry.

And what if the tables are turned. Some hack charges 20% less than the going rate, and your new client now expects the same price? Not only do you have to match it, but you may even have to beat it. Imagine going from $75 for an article to $60 to $50, all because you were too timid and your self-esteem wouldn’t let you charge enough to actually make it worth your while.

3. We’ll never reveal our clients without their permission.

Clients hire us because we agree to be heard, but never seen. They are paying, not only for our writing talent, but for the expectation of silence. That means we have a standing order to never tell anyone who we work for, because it means exposing a secret the client didn’t want to share.

If you want to be able to tell people who you work for, you need permission from your client to share that information. Otherwise, just don’t tell anyone.

4. There are some professions that should never use ghostwriters.

Academics, journalists, researchers, and students.

These people should never hire ghostwriters, and ghostwriters should turn down the work, because it could damage your own reputation. Using a ghostwriter in these situations is unethical, because these are the professions who are expected to do the work themselves. Using ghostwriters constitutes plagiarism, and these are the professions where plagiarism is a huge deal.

Ghostwriting is a profession for people who don’t have big egos that need to be stroked or warmed in the spotlight of recognition. But while a good ghostwriter may be quiet and unnoticed, they have the skills and experience to get the job done when no one else can do it.

Photo credit: Matthew Hurst (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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Three Ghost Blogging Concerns We Hear From Clients

Some people have issues with ghost blogging. We’ve got clients who use it on a regular basis, and love it. Other times, we have run into some people who can’t wrap their brains around it. They’re not sure they want to do it, and they have trouble accepting our help. These people tend to fall into one of three categories.

  • They don’t think they have a high-enough position to need a ghost writer. They don’t think they’re that important to “deserve” it. They think their company needs to be bigger, or they need to have a more prestigious position. I saw this a lot when I was doing speechwriting for a Congressional candidate in 2004. It’s not a matter of prestige, it’s a matter of having the time to do it.
    • Okay, that's kind of creepy.
  • They feel they need to “earn” the words by doing the work themselves. These people have a very strong do-it-yourself ethic, and think that they should be able to and know how to do every aspect of their business. They don’t want someone to do the things they should be capable of doing themselves, and they feel like they’re slacking when they don’t. But a lot of people can’t write quickly or efficiently — they take a couple hours to write a single blog post. That’s a problem when their time is worth $250 an hour, like a defense attorney. Why spend $500 of your billable time, three times a week, when you could hire someone to do the ghost blogging for you?
  • They think writing is so easy that anyone can do it. “After all,” they reason, “I learned how to write in school, so I can just take the skills I learned 20 – 30 years ago, right?” This is like saying, “I know how to work a table saw, so I ought to be able to make my own custom cabinets. Look, we all learned how to communicate via the written word, but that doesn’t make you a writer. A professional ghost blogger has been trained on how to write tight, concise copy that will inform, entertain, or persuade. While some people are able to do this without training, those people are few and far between. Don’t risk turning off your audience with less-than-professional writing that rambles on, is filled with errors, or just plain doesn’t make sense. (Not so surprisingly, these are the same people who demand that every position in their company has experience in their industry, including the accountant, the IT person, and even human resources staff.)

Ghost blogging is one of those services that companies need to maintain an online presence, but don’t have the time or resources to do it. It’s for the people who are too busy to write on a regular basis, no matter what “level” you are in your career. It’s for the people who struggle with writing, or are basically too expensive to do anything that doesn’t directly result in bottom line revenue for their company or firm.

Photo credit: starfish325 (Flickr)

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Who Would You Hire, the Rookie or the Veteran?

I’m occasionally asked by clients whether we have a writer with a specific background. Are/were they in IT, in finance, in animal husbandry?

I can usually find someone with a skill set that matches what the client is looking for, but it’s not always possible. But, it’s not always necessary either. We have two things going for us that make it unnecessary to have a solid background in the client’s industry:

    1. The client provides us with all the information first, and then they approve the final post. If anything is incorrect, they find it before it gets published.
    2. Our writers are smart enough and spend enough time working with a client that they get pretty good at the client’s issues, their value to the client’s, and the features that make the client’s business so awesome. They become marketing copywriters for that company.

So this presents an interesting problem for us. Do we hire a good writer who is smart and can learn the product, or do we hire someone from the industry and fix their writing?

Think of it this way: You’re a baseball coach, and you need to sign a hitter to your team. You have a choice between a rookie who can run from home to 1st in 3.5 seconds, and a veteran who run the same distance in the same time. Who do you pick?

Most people will pick the veteran, because he knows the game and is a proven talent. But the best pick is going to be the rookie. If he can run to 1st in 3.5 seconds right now, think of how great he’ll be if you can hone his technique and teach him a couple tricks to make him run faster.

That’s how we choose our writers. I prefer to work with writers who don’t have the industry skills, because I can teach them about the industry, and help them become better “runners.” But hiring the industry veterans who have reached their writing peak is problematic. I can’t teach them anything new. They’ve gone as far as they’re going to go as writers, unless they dedicate themselves to becoming better writers. (That’s not to say that these adults can’t become writers. It’s just that they have to make a major commitment to improving and becoming better, but I don’t have time to wait for that.)

Who would you choose? Would you go for the industry rookie and teach him or her the ropes, or would you get the industry veteran who has a wealth of knowledge on the topic? Leave a comment and let me hear from you.

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Finding a Working Definition of Ghost Blogging

With all of the controversy that seems to swirl around the acceptability of ghost blogging, I realized we weren’t really arguing about the same thing. The acceptance seemed to be based on their definition of the term.

Is it writing a blog post with the full input approval of a client? Or is it writing a post that doesn’t have any input, but does have approval? As I read descriptions and arguments by Jason Falls, Lindsay Manfredi, and other blogging luminaries, I realized it was the definition that was the problem.

So we created a short little survey to figure out what the most widely understood definition of ghost blogging to be. Survey respondents were given 5 different options of what ghost blogging might entail, and then asked to rate them on a 5 point scale (1 = strongly disagree; 5 = strongly agree). These are the results out of 51 responses, out of a 5 point scale*:

  1. CLIENT writes a post, YOU proofread, edit, and publish under CLIENT’S name: 4 people disagreed or strongly disagreed (7.9%), but 43 people agreed or strongly agreed (84.3%). Rating: 4.41/5
  2. Interview CLIENT and write a post based on their answers. CLIENT approves before article is posted. 1 person strongly disagreed (2%), 47 agreed or strongly agreed 92.2%). Rating: 4.49/5
  3. Write a post for CLIENT using their ideas and past statements. CLIENT approves. 4 people disagreed 7.8%), 44 people agreed or strongly agreed (86.3%). Rating: 4.29/5
  4. Write a post on behalf of CLIENT, using their ideas and past statements. CLIENT does NOT approve post. 31 people scored SD or D (62%), while only 15 people scored A or SA (30%). Rating: 2.5/5
  5. Write a post for CLIENT, using YOUR ideas. CLIENT does NOT approve post. 40 people scored SD or D (78.4%), 8 people scored A or SA (15.7%). Rating: 1.86/5

(*These numbers won’t add up to 51 in this description, because I left the “neither agree nor disagree” out of this text for simplicity and brevity. The actual numbers are at the bottom of this post.)

From these results, we can infer a few basic ideas about ghost blogging’s acceptability:

  • Ghost blogging is acceptable to most people as long as the client approves the posts before they are published. In fact, this was the most important factor in deciding whether ghost blogging is appropriate or not.
  • Ghost blogging is acceptable, as long as the client has input (#2), or at the very least, the ideas used have been addressed in the past (#3). Option #2 is akin to a copywriter sitting down with a client, and synthesizing the client’s thoughts and ideas into a piece of text. Option #3 is similar to a presidential speechwriter who is already familiar with the president’s stance on certain topics, and can write about them with authority.
  • At least 8 people thought it was acceptable to essentially put words in the client’s mouth without their knowledge. Personally, I can’t think of any instance where this would be acceptable, in business or government, let alone blogging. Even when I was writing speeches for the Indiana State Health Commissioner, everything had to follow her vision. Her administrative may have assigned the speech or project, but I had to know the Commissioner’s stand on the issues.
  • Conversely, 4 people thought it is wrong to even proofread and edit a client’s writings, and then post it on the client’s website on their behalf. While I’m a little worried that nearly 16% of the respondents thought it’s okay to pose as a client without the client’s knowledge, I can only wonder at how rigid the beliefs are of the people who are opposed to editing and then copying, pasting, and clicking “Publish.” It also worries me what they would think if they knew I had four editors poring over my book before the publishers printed it for me.

Because the first three options all scored above a 4.4, I can conclude that most people will accept the idea that ghost bloggers need the client’s input and approval before a post gets published. Anything that does not have at least the client’s approval crosses the line of acceptability, and anything that has both input and approval.

So, that is our baseline for acceptable ghost blogging. The next step is to find out how strongly people feel about it, and see if we can get a bigger group to respond. More on that later.