The short answer is that whatever your writing and editing needs, I’ll work with you to achieve your goal. Labels, like boxes, are confining, while writing is a fluid art. Collaborative writing and editing, therefore, involve both art and science. They’re two sides of the same coin.

We write with abandon, get the words and ideas down, pour out our souls and all the wisdom our hearts long to share. Then we take a deep breath and step back from the words’ work and let it rest. That small space permits us look at the work fresh—with a reader’s eyes. Only after a little distance can we more objectively edit: revise, revise again, and polish.

Once we’ve gotten a solid draft of the collaborative writing, I’ll put on a different hat and begin the line-editing process. Again, art and science. Since writing is a fluid process, thorough editing often involves rewriting sentences or paragraphs—with your approval, of course. When we feel all is said and done, and the work is in the layout stage, it’s time for a proofreader.

Ironically, the longer answer to this question involves approaching a collaborative writing project with a mindset known as Occam’s Razor. Some 650 years ago, Franciscan friar William of Ockham introduced the concept that today more or less boils down to “less is more."

Here’s an example of the Occam’s Razor principle: “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” In a nutshell, the simplest solution to a problem—the one that requires the fewest assumptions—is often the right one. That’s why it’s also called the Law of Economy, or the Law of Parsimony.

Long before Ockham, Aristotle recognized that parsimony and precision go hand-in-hand as we make sense of and unravel life’s baffling problems.

What’s this got to do with me? you ask. This principle is front and center when we’re jockeying the pros and cons of writing the books of our dreams, particularly business and how-to books.

We know that to everything there is a season, a time for every purpose. Our reasons for reading a book can be scattershot and impulsive or focused and purposeful. Sometimes a reader needs a book to deliver a little vital inspiration. Other times, that reader just wants to escape into a fantasy world or laugh out loud. Readers don’t always want to learn something. Of course, sometimes, they do and need step-by-step instructions for how to be successful, rich, or thin. Or how to parent special needs children. Or bake bread.

Throughout the ages, writers have met readers’ wants and needs with four major genres of literature—nonfiction, fiction, drama, and poetry, along with dozens of sub-genres. Amazon subdivides the sub-genres into what feels like infinitesimally small units.

In fact, Amazon comes up with sixteen thousand book categories.

Occam’s Razor reminds us to focus on two vital considerations. The first pertains to the genre and scope of your book. The second pertains to the language you use to convey the message in the genre you’ve chosen to write. The first usually sets the stage for the second.

There are distinctively different styles at each end of the writing spectrum. At one end, you’ll find writers who are masters of word economy: Occam’s Razor. If that’s your preference and chosen style, my writing and editing will be attuned to maintaining it consistently.

On the other end are writers whose style is to craft sentences that are rich and sensory, dense with vivid imagery, flowing with symbolism, similes, and metaphors. Target readers will most assuredly be those for whom lush language is wildly, lavishly, and abundantly satisfying.

I’m eager for you to tell me what you read and who are your favorite authors. Your reading choices and experience color your writing style. No style yet? No problem. If you’re a new author, we’ll discover your voice, define your own unique style, and practice the art of crafting language that not only feels right for you and your message but also that hooks your target reader.

When an author dangles before readers the perfect lure—whether those readers are attracted to spare or splendiferous language—they’ll eagerly take the hook. Sometimes, the latter is a surprise, and readers will spin and dance on the end of a line in the sparkling brilliance of the writing, forgetting altogether to thrash or resist.

You own the copyright of your book. You’re the author. Let’s clear up who is who among your book’s cast and crew during a collaboration.

AUTHOR: We may think the author and writer are one and the same person. But, publication statistics inform us that’s not always so. Sixty percent of best sellers and hundreds of thousands of books that never make that list are written by ghostwriters or collaborative writers.

The person whose vision, ideas, stories, or material make up the concept of the book is the “author”—no matter how much help you get developing that idea and turning it into a publishable book.

The author has the legal, moral, and fiscal responsibility for the book. That’s you! And you own the copyright from the moment the first word is set into some tangible form.

WRITER:  The writer crafts the concepts and components of story into words that express the author’s ideas and communicate the author’s message to the reader. When the author has neither the time nor skill, a creative collaboration makes a book possible.

Through experience and training, a collaborator has developed strong writing, research, and organizational skills. The writer enhances, enlarges upon, elaborates on, whittles down, refocuses, massages, and/or polishes the author's message and its presentation and helps the author bring to readers the best possible work.

The author and collaborative writer often share credit as co-authors on a book's cover. But there are other options to explore.

Ghostwriters are collaborative writers. But not all collaborative writers are ghostwriters.

What is collaborative writing? Digging and getting dirty in the garden with you. Or getting dirty instead of you. Either way, it’s a matter of visibility, which, in publishing, is cover credit. Your neighbor knows who planted, weeded, and harvested the bounty in the garden that only came about because of your vision.

If I work under the cloak of darkness, I’m a ghostwriter. In the sunshine, we each grow our brands. This is synonymous with co-authoring, even if both of us don’t get equal weight on the front cover.

Not all collaborative writing projects start from scratch—the optimal place. Sometimes gardens were abandoned and overgrown. Even when I salvage a manuscript that feels irredeemable, I remain rooted in the belief that words are powerful tools to affect change.

To pick up an abandoned manuscript, however, we’ll need to evaluate the impact of subsequent internal or external events on the original focus and goal of your book. When the assessment is that salvage efforts will be worthwhile, we’ll discover or (re-discover) your most compelling voice and powerfully bring your story and message to your target audience.

Both collaborative writing and ghostwriting are a partnership that can feel like a marriage. We’re both committed to each other for the duration of the project and, sometimes, long after. We become each other’s mirror, sounding board, yin and yang, devil’s advocate. You’ve got the picture. That’s not bad. That’s very good. Your book will benefit.

In our first session, an author will hear me say, “Tell me about your platform.” That is, what makes you uniquely qualified to write this book? How have you branded and positioned yourself to earn credibility with your future readers?

Publisher Jane Friedman tells us why author platform is important:

Author platform is…an ability to sell books because of who you are, or whom you can reach. Platform is a concept that first arose in connection with nonfiction authors. Sometime during the 1990s, agents and publishers began rejecting nonfiction book proposals and nonfiction manuscripts when the author lacked a “platform.” Before the advent of the Internet or social media—publishers wanted the author to be in the public eye in some way…with the ability to spread the word easily to sell books. Publishers and agents seek writers [authors] with credentials and authority, [authors] who are visible to their target audience as an expert, thought leader, or professional.

In addition to learning about your platform, I’ll need to understand your thought processes and working style. Are you a driver and a micro-manager? Or are you laid back and Zen about whatever comes your way? Will you fidget and be physically or emotionally uncomfortable with interview sessions lasting longer than an hour? Or will you happily lose track of time when you’re in your zone? Can you comfortably talk a blue streak over three cups of java? Or do you get restless? 

We call all three of these categories creative nonfiction. A memoir and autobiography will cover some of the same ground, but from different perspectives. While they’re definitely different animals, they’re each living, breathing testimonies to the art of telling a true story with enough panache to keep the reader turning pages.

Ah! The enigma of the memorable, marketable, authentic memoir. That brings to mind James Frey’s 2003 best seller, A Million Little Pieces, that ripped the literary world’s page on memoir ethics into a million little pieces. Between the covers of Pieces, published by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Doubleday, Frey penned more than a few events that he confessed “were embellished . . . for obvious dramatic reasons.” Oops!

Truth is often stranger than fiction, and memoirs and autobiographies are fiction if they aren’t truthful.

A memoir is a collection of memories viewed through the lens of time and a mature perspective. What makes a good memoir? A theme runs through it. Feeling swirls around not only in the narrative shallows but also in its depths. And that starts with an emotionally dramatic hook. The cohesive story is told from a first-person point of view. The reconstructions of life-altering experiences or experiments, personal or professional breakthroughs interpose themselves unforgettably somewhere between ordinariness and extraordinariness.

There is more at stake in writing memoirs than authors' willingness to expose their vulnerabilities and beating hearts. Authors open to readers their relationship between their real and imagined selves and their real and imagined places in the world. Reading like a novel, a memoir gets its juiciness from conflict. It’s crafted to show character development (often by masterfully re-creating dialogue) alongside constructing character and story arcs. 

More formal than a memoir, an autobiography encompasses the whole enchilada of an author’s life. It’s a first-person tale that doesn’t need to be chronological—starting with that first cry. Like a memoir, its main character is the author. But its emphasis is less on the multi-faceted emotional responses to tipping-points in the author's life than on the events themselves and, perhaps, their consequences.

Biographies go where autobiographies go, but they’re written by someone other than the subject. They require copious research and no small amount of risk in getting the story right.

Why are memoirs, autobiographies, and biographies so popular? Because there's a little voyeur in all of us. Many of us can't resist a bit of scintillating, behind-the-scenes drama. Humans are fascinating mammals. Our DNA is up to 99 percent identical. Yet, it's that 1 percent that makes life interesting. We don’t all laugh at the same jokes or cry during the same sad/happy scenes or grieve over the same stings and sorrows.

It's your turn to tell your story. Keep in mind that there are no guarantees that the anecdotes recounting your life’s ups and downs will be as riveting to readers as they were life-changing to you. If you aspire to be more than a raconteur, you need to construct a real story with an edge that rings true. Never risk the loss of reputation with fabrications as did Frey.

Your sinking-in-quicksand story has likely been told in various iterations by authors since ancient history. The tale of parachuting into the Pacific as your fighter plane spiraled out of control, flames engulfing its fuselage, has been told, too.

If it’s true that there is nothing new under the sun, then the thrill of the tale must be in its telling. So tell your tale well. I'm here to help.

In today’s competitive marketplace, you want to do all you can to help your memoir go viral faster than Instagram messages dish about celebrity infidelities. You have sharable secrets behind once-locked doors, nuances behind less-than-colorful facts, effects that creep from the woodwork of suspicious causes. There were catalysts for your awakening and foundations erected from rubble and ruin. What were they?

What pearls will you offer the reader of your professional death-defying tale? Is there something redemptive in your suffering that led you to a new beginning? Is there an epiphany in the inelegant failure that shredded your personal or professional ego? What higher voice urged your last-ditch attempt to climb out of the abyss? What battle did you win through courage or cunning? What lessons did you learn while training your dragon? Where does the sphere that is your authentic, wounded, and bleeding self intersect with your readers’ spheres?

Mourning the deaths of her husband and daughter in her autobiographical play, The Year of Magical Thinking, celebrated writer Joan Didion stood astride her suffering in search of her authentic voice and insights about loss that could resonate with her audience.

“The idea that whoever appeared onstage [or in a book or screenplay] would play not me but a character was central to imagining how to make the narrative,” Didion wrote. Didion’s connection with her own vulnerability deepened her connection with her reader. “I would need to see myself from outside. I would need to locate the dissonance between the person I thought I was and the person other people saw.”

In that act of self-surgery, Didion opened herself so that others could see inside themselves. How will you open yourself to your readers?

For both nonfiction and fiction, a developmental edit is an important first step in your book’s journey to publication, particularly if you’re a new author. Like a high-altitude drone, a developmental edit surveys the sweeping landscape of your manuscript, revealing roads that go nowhere and canyons and the rivers that need bridging.

The developmental edit then zooms closer on critical features: extractive industries despoiling the wild spaces, invasive species harming the ecosystem, and architectural structures that weren’t conceived to naturally integrate with their environment.

For nonfiction, these metaphors suggest assessment at the chapter level of the strength and integrity of your book’s main theme or thesis and how you develop it from the beginning of your manuscript to its satisfying conclusion. The search is also on to discover lost or dropped storylines, holes in the fabric of your logic or information, shifted emphasis in an argument, scope overwhelm, or insufficient information to fulfill your promise to your reader.

For fiction, the overview takes in plot, character development, dialogue, continuity, consistency, and more.
The developmental edit pulls you out of the black hole of manuscript fatigue and lost perspective and brings you back into awareness of your reader’s need to be rescued from dangling over a cliff on a frayed rope. It recalibrates flawed assumptions and builds bridges of relevance and meaning where they had collapsed or were nonexistent. The developmental edit survey has one objective: to help you craft content that your reader can connect with, benefit from, enjoy, and recommend.

More than any other type of edit, a developmental edit challenges you to be open-minded, flexible, and thick-skinned. Because a developmental edit can trigger major manuscript changes, the author-editor relationship must be sown in the fertile ground of mutual trust and respect (and cultivated with humor).

Your developmental edit will include a detailed editorial letter evaluating your manuscript’s strengths and vulnerabilities and recommendations for approaches to take your idea and shape it to meet your one reader’s needs. You’re always the final arbiter of these recommendations.

Late-stage developmental editing can be as arduous, time-consuming, and expensive as writing a book from scratch—often, more so. In fact, late-term work sometimes shifts to collaborative rewriting. So it’s good to start working together early.

Copy editing is the last, highly detail-oriented, rules-based task in your book’s process after line-editing and before your book goes to the designer for interior layout. That means the manuscript has gone through its last revision and the author has signed off up to this point.

The copy edit corrects spelling, grammar, syntax, and punctuation. It catches name, number, capitalization, hyphenation, and italicization inconsistencies. It removes unintentional repetition, fact checks, and flags language that’s not inclusive.

Sometimes, it seems that line editors and copy editors navigate a manuscript with a Merriam Webster Dictionary under one arm and a Chicago Manual of Style under the other. Thankfully, they're also at our fingertips in digital versions.

The copy edit includes development of a style sheet—a mini style guide, or rule book, that documents the choices made specifically within your manuscript. The style sheet assures that everyone who works on your manuscript knows which choices were made (and, sometimes, why). It’s helpful to the author and saves time for the proofreader.

If you wish, I’ll provide the why and how of my recommendations and corrections rather than just make changes so that you’re aware of them for your future writing. If the why doesn’t matter to you, just tell me, and I’ll save my breath.