Gathering Material and Doing the Research: Excerpt from my book: "A Friendly Guide to Writing and Ghostwriting
. . . with nonfiction, the task is straightforward: Do the research, tell the story.
- - - Laura Hillenbrand
Congratulations! The contracts are signed and you’re about to start your ghostwriting job. Revel in your good fortune because the thrill will be short-lived. After you call your mother or your spouse or your best friend to report your success and strut a little, reality sets in. You just signed on to write a book of anywhere between seventy to ninety thousand words for someone you met once. Or maybe you had one phone call. You feel good about beating out the other writers but what you’re facing can be daunting.
If you feel apprehensive, take heart that before you put anything on paper, you’ll be gathering material, transcribing tapes and conducting interviews. All of these things take time. If you're collaborating with an ordinary person who has done something extraordinary like risking their lives or triumphing over adversity, you can rely on personal interviews to find out what you need to know. If, on the other hand, you're working with a celebrity, there is an abundance of available material to sort through before the one on one interviews begin. It would be a relief to depend solely on what your client tells you, but they often leave things out, either deliberately or through memory lapses, so you’ll have to discover some of it for yourself and see if it’s relevant. Or if they’ll let you use it.
When I was about to start a project some years ago, several large Fed Ex boxes showed up at my front door, filled to the brim with my legendary client’s press releases, triumphs, photographs, awards and personal appearances over the years. Sorting through it all seemed like a steep mountain to climb. But when I started to systematically study the material, I realized that it’s better to have too much than too little. You just have to make sure it doesn't unnerve you. If can trust in yourself and in the process, if you can stay present with what you're doing, you’ll eventually figure it all out.
Once I’ve scanned what arrives through the mail, I Google the star’s name to read the Wikipedia description and find lists of headlines and articles about various phases of their lives. Everyone likes gossip so if there were scandals, they show up at the top of the list. I had a client who was jailed for ten days on drug charges when he was eighteen. Fifty years later, that story still appears at the top of his Wikipedia profile. It's unfortunate. Many of us did some crazy things when we were teenagers and would prefer that no one knew about them, but these are the kinds of sacrifices and tradeoffs people have to make when they live their lives in the public eye.
These days, there are a variety of social media sites that offer information on the lives of celebrities but it’s important to keep in mind that a lot of that information is inaccurate. It might be there by happenstance or it may be intentional. Whichever it is, if you pay close attention, it will most likely become clear to you. Keep in mind that you’re doing research not only to gain information. You’re also doing research to find out what is true.
A valuable source of information is a celebrity’s online fan club. Fans post statistics there, like when a particular singing group was formed, when an artist turned solo, when a new CD was launched, movie premieres, awards, concerts, plays, marriages and divorces, discographies and filmographies with names and dates. More often than not, the celebrity doesn’t remember these things.
When I met Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane fame, she greeted me at her door and said, “Come on in. I don’t remember what happened in my life. I was drunk for most of it.”
Just what a collaborator doesn't want to hear – but I didn't let it throw me. Little by little, I found ways to spart her memory. It worked a lot of the time, but if she still couldn't remember something, she gave me access to a loyal fan she had befriended who became my go-to guy. Whatever I needed to know, he had the answers. If he didn’t, he knew how to get them. In the past, when I met fans who knew every little thing about a celebrity’s comings and goings, I thought to myself, “Get a life.” Now I’m grateful to them because they make my job so much easier.
When I start to recognize some continuity in the information I’m gathering, I pay attention to how one phase of his or her life led to the next. Some of my research reveals what a client did and some of it reveals missing links to what they didn't do. I approach my research like I’m an archeologist, unearthing hidden pearls that will build a pathway from the past to the present. Author Steve Magee says, Research is defining the invisible.
I believe that you can't do too much research but one of the pitfalls is getting distracted by a particular topic and veering off onto an avenue that has nothing to do with the book. It’s important to keep bringing yourself back to what is relevant. I begin by highlighting different topics with particular colors on the pages. I may use blue to indicate childhood to adolescence, from teens to adulthood in green and from career to family life in red. Then I gather together the pages of each color, put them in separate files and I go through them for repetitions and extraneous information. This is how I formulate the questions I want to ask during the interviews. If you date the material and make copies, both electronic and hard copy in case of a computer glitch, you’ll feel secure and ready to move on to the thing that will make or break the book – the all important one on one interviews.