
Can a Ghostwriter Write a Family History?
Recording your family history is an incredible project – one that can preserve the legacy of each member of your family for many generations to come. However, it’s also pretty tough to pull together, especially if you don’t have any experience in writing.
Whether a memoir covers one individual or a whole family, it requires writing skills: knowledge of formatting, an idea of how to frame each of the stories, and the basics of literary writing. Even when you’re creating a book just for your family members to read and admire, you still need to make sure it looks good and reads well.
That’s where a ghostwriter can come in.
Preserving the Past
Putting together a family history takes a lot of work. You have to:
- Interview surviving family members
- Examine family documents and photographs
- Research local documentation, such as records of marriages, births, and deaths
- Compile all of the information in a way that is easy to understand and sort
- Sift through different versions of the remembered truth to find the closest thing to the real story
- Track down what might have happened to individuals who have disappeared from memory
- Collate everything into a format that can be read and followed
It’s a lot of work, particularly for one person to take on – and even more so if that person is untrained and inexperienced, while also working a job or juggling the responsibility of looking after older or younger family members.
Put all of that together, and it’s easy to see why a ghostwriter can be better placed to help you preserve the past. We can move faster and dedicate all of our time to the project, meaning stories don’t slip away with elderly family members who don’t have years of time to wait for the book to be completed.
We also have the skills to actually turn a family history into a book – a coherent and cohesive document that can be professionally bound and handed down through generations, with the option to print as many copies as you like.
Capturing Family Voices
If you’re worried about making things impersonal by bringing in a ghostwriter, don’t be. Capturing the client’s voice is part of the job, and we make sure that we are faithful to the voices within your whole family while telling each of their stories. At the end of the project, what you will have is not just a factual account but also a love letter, from each member of the family to all of the others.
Your ghostwriter will work with you closely over the period of the project, interviewing each family member as many times as needed to get the story down faithfully. Adding research skills to the mix might make the book more factually accurate, but that doesn’t mean it has to be less personal and authentic. When the book is finished, you should really feel as though there is no one single author – but that you all worked on the book together.
Of course, if you want to be the sole source for your family history, that’s okay! In that case, the book will be written in your voice. Or, again, it’s okay for you to choose to have the book written in a more neutral tone if that’s the style you have in mind.
Remember, this project is yours, and so you can steer it in the direction that feels right to you. With family histories, there is less of a commercial aspect, which means you don’t need to stick as closely to the conventions of literary storytelling. Instead, you can break the rules and do whatever you like with the manuscript – it will be yours to keep and use as you like.
If you’re looking to get a family history written soon, get in touch with me today. I’ll talk you through all of the options, give you some potential packages to choose from, and offer answers to any further questions you may have about the process.
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