The Difference Between Writing Fantasy for Clients and Writing Fantasy for Yourself
Hello, dear readers,
When you're a ghostwriter, you have to treat every book as if it were your own. You give it the attention it deserves. You build it carefully. You invest enough thought and care into it that you can be proud of the final result.
Because one of the most important responsibilities of a good ghostwriter is stepping into the client's mind and bringing their story to life as if they had written it themselves.
And that requires a lot of conversations. A lot of questions. A lot of listening. Because in the end, everything comes down to one thing: Understanding the story.
When I work with a client, I don't start writing immediately.
First, I need to understand what that person is trying to say. What the themes are. Who the characters are. What emotions are driving the story.
Then I start asking questions. A lot of questions. Sometimes a client knows exactly what they want. Sometimes they only know how they want the reader to feel. And my job is to help shape that idea into something tangible.
But when I write my own books, things are completely different. In fact, I almost never start with a detailed outline. Not because I don't need one. But because at the beginning, I often don't know where the story is going myself. I don't know the characters well enough yet. I don't know exactly what I'm trying to say. Sometimes I don't even understand what the story is truly about until I start writing it.
As the pages accumulate, I begin to understand the characters, the world, and even myself a little better. Only then do I start seeing the direction.
Sometimes the outline for the ending doesn't appear until I've already reached the middle of the book. Because before anything else, I am an artist. As seriously as I take writing as a profession, I always leave room for creativity. To explore the story. To experiment. To get a little lost before I find the right path.
Because that's often where the best ideas are born.
I don't always know what I'm trying to say. Sometimes I simply write.
Weeks or even months pass before I realize that I was actually angry. Or powerless. Or trying to process an injustice I had experienced. And then I realize that I've poured those emotions into the story. That I've transformed them into characters, conflicts, and themes. Maybe that's why writing often feels like a form of therapy. Not because it solves my problems, but because it helps me understand them.
And I think that's the biggest difference between writing for clients and writing for myself.
As a ghostwriter, I understand the story before I begin writing it. When I write my own books, I often don't fully understand the story until after I've written it.
I love both experiences.
Because one teaches me how to understand other people's stories. And the other helps me understand my own.
If you’d like to follow the journey of the book I am writing and see how it’s coming together, you can find more here:
But if you want to, you can see more about my work as a ghostwriter here:
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