Guest Post: The Transformative Power of Sincere Ghostwriting Collaboration

By Albo Devine

Over the past 12+ years helping bring 25 ghostwriting projects to life— from paradigm-shifting nonfiction to gripping memoir to illuminating fiction—the most important ingredient I’ve discovered for success in a collaboration is sincerity.

Believe it or not, this sincerity is always the same. Whether an author is a billionaire ‘somebody’ or a blue-collar ‘nobody’, a seasoned entertainer or a budding entrepreneur, an established authority or a record-breaking athlete, what I’ve found across five continents of successful collaboration in several languages are two simple rules for sincere collaboration.

Perhaps not so coincidentally, they are the same rules my tea teacher taught me to foster when I serve tea to guests:

1. No fixed outcome
2. A willingness to be transformed

Wait. I hear you protest. What about the business: the budgets, timelines, & SMART goals? What about the fate of the finished book? How do you maintain professionality with such uncertain rules?

In this post I intend to answer those questions and provide my perspective on a type of ghostwriting that has transformed the authors I work with and myself along the way. It revolves around three words: curiosity, catharsis & clarity. Call them pillars, phases, or postures, each operates in an overlapping synchronicity with the others to ensure a collaboration—and its resulting book—is sincere.

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Curiosity

We begin with a spirit of exploration. Adventure. This is absolutely essential in all stages of a ghostwriting collaboration but especially in the beginning. After all, if we are going to follow the first rule—that there be no fixed outcome—then we have to crack open our automatic assumptions about what any given project must be. This isn’t the time to be pulling out competitive titles and other books that seem like this one. It’s a time to set all expectation aside.

And where do we begin such a seemingly wishy-washy journey?

With questions, of course.

What does this author want to say? Why now? Why not something else? Someone else? Why does it need to be a book? In what form does this expression want to exist?

Usually there is an impetus—sometimes the recommendations of friends over the years, other times a small accumulation of notes on scratch paper that have built into a large stack, and now and then, even a sudden, unignorable impulse to express something—to take that first brave step to contact a ghostwriter for help on a book. These are all great threads to investigate in the early stages of a project, before any outlines or chapters are written at all. The moment the flame meets the kindling.

As the ghostwriter, it’s my job to ask the questions, but it’s up to both the author and me to tap into what arises in the answers. This deep listening is curiosity at its apex.

Through conversational interviews—and individual contemplation between those chats—we can start to quiet down the plotting and scheming mechanizations that lead to contrived, cliché and commercially shortsighted projects. And forgettable experiences.

We can finally get to the most important question, one that we shouldn’t stop asking until the book is finished. Beyond the author’s desire, beyond the ghostwriter’s experience, what does this book want to be?

In other words, we have to listen to the book itself. Cleared away of our fiddling. If this sounds like an exercise in book-whispering, then you are starting to see how curiosity comes to life. This is where we find the power of the book to transform the author, the ghostwriter—and, in time, the reader.

Catharsis

With no fixed outcome from the onset, the spirit of the process might seem overwhelming. The mind reels at the volume of interviews alone for any single topic. Then, of course, there are the more sensitive areas at the core or periphery of a story—the business missteps of an entrepreneur, the family trauma of a memoirist, the fraught politics in a historical fiction novel—that appear better left avoided or at least under discussed.

But a sincere ghostwriting collaboration is a safe space. I’ve had authors tell me things they’ve never admitted to their therapists. Things they wanted to take with them to the grave.

How did I get them to talk about these untouchable places of their hearts?

I simply reminded them of the simple truth that just because we discuss something doesn’t mean it goes into the final book. It doesn’t even mean it has to be drafted into a chapter. It certainly doesn’t mean the people who it might most affect—their family and friends—will read it.

What’s important is that these thornier—or even more seemingly unrelated or innocuous—tangents of a project are given fresh air. Once things are in the open, the authors inevitably feel relief. They are unburdened. Free. I can see them more completely. The book can now be injected with their unique character in ways that were impossible when they stuck to the surface. This goes far beyond voice or personality but gets to the soul. We can sense the book more clearly, since we are more aligned on what the author has been through.

Catharsis is one of only two promises I make in every one of my ghostwriting agreements and it can be an ends all on its own. It isn’t uncommon for some of these authors to decide not to release their book after all. These folks got everything they were looking for out of the process. Others thought they wanted to pursue a traditional publishing arrangement in the beginning change their minds to go for a smaller boutique press, self, or hybrid publishing since it gave them more control over the final release. If the process has been imbued with sincerity, then the transformation of the author has already occurred and whether the book is released at all becomes a separate matter. The orientation for what the book is and what it means has undergone a significant shift.

Wiser minds put it this way: you write the book for yourself first and if you want to release it, you edit it to fit the readers for whom it will resonate. If you fixate only on the second phase, you risk missing out on the catharsis entirely, to say nothing of the transformation.

Clarity

The itch to write a book stirs from somewhere at the core of our beings. It pulls at our heart strings. It’s an existential need on the road to self-actualization. A way to be seen and heard—and most importantly, believed. I’ve had authors tell me that even decades of therapy and spiritual practices had not brought them the kind of unencumbered state of mind that writing their books had.

It would be unfair—and to my experience so far, untrue—to claim that writing a book has the power to unequivocally transcend the author into an irreversible state of nirvana. However, if they are engaged in a sincere effort, my experience has taught me that it significantly helps authors understand their lives, their work, their meaning in the world in a way that few other methods can. So often authors I’ve worked with have spent valuable time with therapists, traveled to faraway places on retreat, and worked with different modalities in an effort to transform or heal themselves or to gain insight into their place in the world. What writing a book guarantees—that these other approaches don’t—is fixed, safe, linear clarity.

To put it another way, a book is a place to call home.

Of course, many authors describe transformative experiences in their pages of their projects. These include moments like their wedding day, the death of a loved one, or, indeed, a powerful moment of awakening on a retreat on the other side of the world. By reliving these experiences during our conversations and refining them through the drafting and editing phases, the truth of the experiences become crystalized. Remembered. Redefined. The most important moments of their lives or their work or their art become clearer than ever before.

Best of all, they are placed into context with other moments—similar and different—to create a richer tapestry of who the author is, what they’ve been through, and what they want to express. Context is so important to clarity and books offer a chance to compile that context in a way few other creative acts can.

I often remind the authors I work with that no one’s entire life can fit into a book—that choices can and will be made about what to include and what to leave out—but there is a reason that books have survived for so long. They are an old, ancient technology, because they are a very effective one. Books offer a chance at clarity in a world of chaos, where our minds constantly forget that which is most vital to us. Books are fixed, safe & linear.

In that way, the book does the job of storing and sharing our memories for ourselves, those we love, and those we may never meet but yearn to relate to in an intimate way. Books can give the memories most precious to us a home and welcome the world to visit long after we are gone. Although all authors will see their own relationship to the books they’ve written change over the years, the books themselves will be fixed expressions of a moment in time. In a world of change and impermanence, books offer a chance to press the pause button and show us something clear and true. A port for the storms of life.

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Now, is this the only way to collaborate? No. Are collaborations that don’t follow these rules, by definition, ‘insincere’? Not necessarily.

There are many ghostwriters—and, increasingly, Artificial Intelligence tools—that can help authors who have a narrower focus, a more specific objective, and a more surface-level concern for writing a book. Not all books need to be transformative experiences in order to meet the stated goals of a collaboration. If an author has a mostly complete idea of what they want out of their book, there are many other collaborators (human and machine) that can help them bring that vision to life.

But I am not interested in those projects, no matter how big the budget or how renowned the author.

Because, you see, ghostwriting might be my career and the way I provide for my newborn twin children but that’s not all. It is how I enrich my understanding of the world. How I challenge myself, unlearn old paradigms, and experience that all-too-rare experience of fully inhabiting another person’s perspective. Indeed, ghostwriting is how I am also transformed.

Wait. You may still be protesting. I thought you said you would get into budgets, timelines, goals, publishing?

If you’ve read this far, then surely you’ve come to understand that I might look at ghostwriting a bit differently from my colleagues. Curiosity, Catharsis, and Clarity aren’t just my pillars, phases or postures. They define my purpose and as such, they are priceless and timeless.

How do I budget time and resources for a project? I simply ask the project what it needs and listen.

When I first started ghostwriting, my intention was to ghost so I could subsidize my own writing. After many experiences with sincere collaboration, this orientation has flipped. I have been transformed. I had it backwards all along. And writing under my own name has never been more sincere.

Only by holding Curiosity, Catharsis, and Clarity sincerely in my heart first, was I be able to help others discover those qualities in their projects and themselves. When that happens, the books write themselves. That’s the power of sincerity in ghostwriting collaboration.

After all, it’s not so different from serving tea. Real hospitality is being able to anticipate what your guests need before they do. And what we all want, deep down, above everything else, is to tell and hear the truth. Big and small Truths. Capital and lower-case truths. Over and over and over again.

Albo Devine — recognized by his trademark facial hair and Al The Ghost moniker — specializes in stories with an international angle. He lives in Kamakura, Japan and Los Angeles, California. He can be reached at al@altheghostwriter.com or www.altheghostwriter.com