Joshua Lisec talks to BBC Radio 5 Live Drive about the job of ghostwriting and how to structure a book.
The books you’ve written, Joshua, and you’ve written countless books, are they all in your voice? Could we identify your voice? Or do you try to get into the mind of the person themselves and therefore you have a different way of delivering the speech patterns, for example.
The more high-profile a person is, the more critical it is to their brand control that it sound like them, as opposed to, gee, this person obviously had a ghostwriter. What they’re looking for is authenticity.
Is that a level of impersonation? You’re mimicking them. How do you begin to do that?
I describe ghostwriting among other things as “acting in print,” where just as an actor or actress would be depicting, say, a public figure on the silver screen or on the stage, it’s identical. It’s my job to portray the author as if I am the author themselves, using their own verbatim, their own tells, so to speak, their literally tells, so that you can tell it’s them.
