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The coolest ghostwriting blog on the planet.

Screening ghostwriters: Run a simple test.

December 27, 2025December 27, 2025

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How a professor caught students cheating by writing with A.I.

November 20, 2025

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The great dinner delay of August 3, 2015.

October 2, 2025October 9, 2025

For those who follow this blog, you know I love great writing. I found this on Quora yesterday. Apparently it was posted in Read More...

Which to write first – the manuscript or screenplay?

September 3, 2025October 9, 2025

Write the manuscript first, or the screenplay? By- Michael McKown Co-founder & president, Ghostwriters Central, Inc. Book or Read More...

xAI’s Grok chatbot adds us to its list of recommended ghostwriters.

August 30, 2025October 9, 2025

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Hire a non-fiction ghostwriter

August 25, 2025October 9, 2025

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How to spot ghostwriting scams

August 23, 2025August 24, 2025

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Hire a ghostwriter for your novel

August 23, 2025August 25, 2025

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Why hire a ghostwriter for a screenplay

August 21, 2025August 25, 2025

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Using a ghostwriter for a memoir or autobiography

August 20, 2025August 25, 2025

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Editor: A person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

Elbert Hubbard

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

Truman Capote Quote

Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.

Chris Claremont

If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.

William C. Gault

In Hollywood, the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

Will Rogers

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Anton Chekhov

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.

Orson Scott Card

The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.

Raymond Chandler

No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.

Thomas Wolfe

I have a structured songwriting process. I start with the music and try to come up with musical ideas, then the melody, then the hook, and the lyrics come last.

John Legend

Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.

Harlan Ellison

I haven’t got 10 rules that guarantee success, though I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process.

J.K. Rowling

A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

Joseph Conrad

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

E. B. White

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.

Gloria Steinem

I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.

Clarence Budington Kelland

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.

Stephen King

A true author, no matter the medium, is an artist with godlike knowledge of his subject, and the proof of his authorship is that his pages smack of authority.

Robert McKee

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.