Technology
David Brewster
My book ghostwriting tools in 2021

Every now and then I’m asked about the various resources I use when I’m working on ghostwriting a book. These things change occasionally, so I thought it would be a good idea to share what I am using as my main book writing tools in 2021. So here they are: from recording interviews to organising to drafting to (almost) collaborating.

My book ghostwriting tools in 2021
Work Life
David Brewster
When to avoid showing your vulnerable side

Being willing to reveal a bit of yourself, especially through a bit of self-effacing humour, will lighten your text and give your readers something to connect to.

But this blog post is not about that sort of vulnerability.

No, this time I want to remind you of two of the less inspiring but just-as-important vulnerabilities every writer faces. Those vulnerabilities are backup and data security.

I was reminded recently about this by a rare computer crash that led to me losing a small amount of work. It wasn’t important and was easily recovered, but it could have been so much worse. Imagine losing a whole book to a hard drive crash!

When to avoid showing your vulnerable side
Write a book
David Brewster
No time, money or skill? You can still get your ...

If there’s one thing you learn from spending a chunk of your career in the world of books and writing, it’s that there are a lot of great stories out there. Personal stories of remarkable success against the odds. Business stories of risk taking and growth. Political stories of intrigue and persistence.

It would be great if all these stories could be told. As Spanish philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. Ideally, the stories would be recorded in books because books last. They go onto shelves and into libraries. They won’t disappear or become unreadable with new technologies.

Unfortunately, many terrific stories are never written down. Sometimes that’s because their owners don’t want to share them. Often

No time, money or skill? You can still get your book written
Reviews
David Brewster
The ghostwriter's nightmare scenario

Ghostwriter characters don't make it into fiction very often, but when they do they always seem to find themselves in jeopardy. 

In the 2010 Roman Polanski film The Ghost Writer, Ewan McGregor plays a ghostwriter working for a former British prime minister. In the end he knows too much and ... it doesn't end well. 

In the Netflix series House of Cards, Paul Sparks plays ghostwriter Thomas Yates who, after struggling to extract a decent memoir out of the president, fails to keep his professional distance, you might say. It takes a while – three seasons in fact – but it doesn't end well for him either.

And now we have Australian writer Richard Flanagan's latest novel, First Person, in which the narrator is a ghostwriter hired to author the memoir of a notorious conman. The story was inspired by Flanagan's own experience, very early in his career, of ghostwriting the autobiography of fraudster John Friedrich in 1991.

The ghostwriter's nightmare scenario
Writing
David Brewster
The joy of a good yarn

I love that my work as a ghostwriter gives me the opportunity to help people get their stories told. What I love even more is the fact that working on other people's stories gives me a front-row seat to those yarns.

Take Around the Grounds, for instance – a book that will be released by Finch Publishing on August 1. 

For this book I've been working with former ABC radio broadcaster Peter Newlinds. Peter's story is a celebration of sport, but from the spectator's side of the fence. This perspective gives the story a level of accessibility that most sporting memoirs, written as they are by former players, can't have. Few of us have the ability to play elite sport, but all of us are more than capable of joining in from the relative safety of the stands.

Of course we don't all have access to the commentary box as Peter did…

The joy of a good yarn

Productivity

The art of compartmentalising (or how I finished four books in a year)

The art of compartmentalising (or how I finished four books in a year)

During the last year I've helped four separate books come to life: a business book and three memoirs. My involvement in these has varied from drafting and re-drafting all 80,000 words to heavy editing and rewriting. In three cases I've assisted with self-publishing while the other book will be trade published next month (more on that next time).

While I've thoroughly enjoyed working on each of these books, the challenge has been that I needed to work on all four at once. They were all at different stages at different times, but none of them could be left completely alone for very long. In addition the books were all quite different from one another in terms of their content, style and tone.

Moving between them without losing too much concentration was not always easy. The secret to my success, I believe, was that over the years I've become quite adept at compartmentalisation of my time and focus.

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My favourite new tool for writing is not an app. It's a standing desk.

If there's one thing that writers do well, it is sitting. We are experts at it, simply because we get so much practice. We spend most of every day parked on our posteriors. Typically this is combined with a well refined hunch over the keyboard to provide the perfect recipe for a lifetime of tight shoulders and cricked necks. 

This is not good. Humans weren't designed to spend most of our time sitting. If we were we wouldn't need expensive chairs with height, tilt and lumbar adjustment – none of which ever seem to be quite right. On top of which we now have those pesky scientists exposing numerous risks to our health from prolonged sitting.

So what to do?

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The power of a 'go to' routine

The power of a 'go to' routine

I've been a self-employed, home-based, full-time writer now for something approaching a decade. Which likely makes the extroverts amongst you a bit jittery. But it's a way of working that suits my particular personality quite nicely, thanks.

I'm often asked how I manage to work at home and not become distracted by other things around the house – housework, hobbies, even just the television. The answer is actually very simple: I have a routine, and I stick to it.

In fact the routine I use is more or less what I've been using ever since the first day I started working from my home office. Back then, I realised that if I was going to make the work-from-home thing work I would have to be disciplined about it – especially as I am someone who generally dislikes routine. From the very first day I was at my desk by 8am and it has been that way (give or take 15 minutes) ever since. 

The routine I use is built around my energy levels.

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Relearning the art of focus for greater productivity

Relearning the art of focus for greater productivity

One of my favourite albums of 2015 (and a favourite of many it seems) was by Melbourne artist Courtney Barnett. It also has a ripper title: Sometimes I sit and think, and sometimes I just sit.

'Sometimes I just sit.' Imagine that.

When did you last just 'sit', as opposed to 'sit thinking' or, more likely, 'sit staring at your phone'?

I tried to do it the other day, while killing some time before picking up my daughter. I left my phone in my pocket, so I succeeded in avoiding that last one, but I found it almost impossible not to have the brain churning over my to-do list while I watched the world go by. 

Perhaps it is the modern malaise that we are destined to be 'always on'.

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The single biggest way to get more focused and productive

The single biggest way to get more focused and productive

As I prepared my breakfast this morning it dawned on me that technology’s obsession with notifications isn’t restricted to devices like the Apple Watch. These days everything needs to tell you when it’s done. Our toaster beeps when it has finished its cycle. So does the dishwasher. And the washing machine. Even my electric toothbrush alerts me to the fact that I’ve been brushing for the optimum amount of time.

It’s only a matter of time before all these notifications get rerouted to Silicon Valley and back to my phone or (if I had one) watch.

It was this realisation that caused me to revisit the notifications on my phone.

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Why I (sadly) won't be buying an Apple Watch, and you shouldn't either

Why I (sadly) won't be buying an Apple Watch, and you shouldn't either

I am an unashamed technophile and fan of virtually all things Apple. I’m always pretty keen to get my hands on the newest Apple release in fairly quick time, so I am instinctively drawn towards the freshest fruit on the tree: the Apple Watch.

Three things held me back from yielding to this temptation early on. First, the Apple Watch doesn’t come cheap. I need to know $500+ would be money well spent. Second, and with that in mind, I don’t wear a watch – I haven’t for years – so I need to be convinced that I would be comfortable wearing this ‘timepiece’. And third, history tells us that the second generation of Apple’s devices is usually a big step forward from the first so perhaps better to wait a year regardless.

However, after reading and listening to a number of reviews of the watch (such as this one), I’m even less convinced that I will ever need an Apple Watch. While it aims to make us more productive, my current thinking is that it could quite possibly do the opposite.

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Save your hands, and your time, by using keyboard shortcuts

Save your hands, and your time, by using keyboard shortcuts

A little while back I wrote about the benefits of making the investment to learn touch typing. A benefit of touch typing that I didn’t mention in that post is that it gives you quick and easy access to keyboard shortcuts. But even if you’re a hunt-and-peck style typist, learning and using keyboard shortcuts has its own advantages.

Keyboard shortcuts allow you to get things done while leaving your hands over the keyboard, rather than constantly reaching for the mouse. While this may seem trivial, over a day you will find that using shortcuts is not only a lot more efficient than using the mouse, but it is also creates less stress in your hand and arm. Mouse usage is often associated with repetitive strain-type pains in the wrist, forearm and shoulder.

Even if you are already a ‘Control+C/V’ user, chances are there are many more keyboard shortcuts available to you that you are either unaware of or don’t use.

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Is your business remembering the lessons of the past?

Is your business remembering the lessons of the past?

Last week I was walking past a small local warehouse when I overheard a conversation taking place between what looked like one of the supervisors and a storeman. They were ‘debating’ what had happened to some lost stock – something about someone not recording the paperwork properly.

It was an innocuous conversation really, but it struck a chord with me. I knew, because I used to work in that sort of environment, that the same conversation was probably taking place in hundreds of warehouses, large and small, across my city that day. They took place yesterday, and they would take place the next day. Ad infinitum.

The repetitiveness of this type of situation raises the question: If many people in workplaces spend a lot of time fixing problems, why is it that the same problems keeping reappearing, over and over and over again?

The answer is simple: because organisations rarely learn from their mistakes.

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Want to be more productive? Learn to touch type

Want to be more productive? Learn to touch type

Typing is the new handwriting. Honestly – other than filling out a form, when is the last time you wrote anything substantial using a pen? When did you last send someone a handwritten letter? Most of us don’t even send Christmas cards any more, and if we do we include a typed update rather than writing inside the card.

We all type, all the time. Even if you’re not a writer, you are writing. Emails. Social media updates. Web searches. By my guesstimation, writing is now third in line as a written communication method behind typing on a keyboard and tapping on a screen. Bringing up the rear but likely to catch up before long is typing using your voice.

So, given that you spend so much time typing, have you ever learnt to touch type? You know, typing using all ten fingers and without looking at the keyboard.

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PDF: still a great way to securely share your documents

PDF: still a great way to securely share your documents

There is a lot of talk in these and other pages about the use of the ‘ePub’ and other ebook formats formats to get your book onto the digital market. However there will be times when you don’t want to go to any trouble: you just want to share a document, ideally with some level of security to prevent it being easily duplicated.

In these cases the good old-fashioned PDF file may well be your answer. PDFs have a number of advantages for quick and easy sharing:

  • They are easy to create from any application’s ‘print’ menu.
  • They can be read on virtually any computer, tablet or smartphone, no matter the operating system, and normally without the reader having to install additional software.
  • They replicate the formatting and layout of your document, no matter what sort of device the recipient chooses to read it on.
  • While not absolutely bullet proof, they can be made secure in a number of ways.
  • They are often smaller files than their word processor equivalents.

The PDF is as close as you will get to a ‘digital photocopy’.

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