Stories for healing

The books I ghostwrite for my clients are in the inspirational, philosophical, and self-help genres — so definitely nonfiction. One of the strengths I bring to this work is the fact that I have spent decades honing my skills as a writer of short stories.

Any good wordsmith will tell you that sometimes you have to make up a story to get at the truth (think parables in spiritual texts). Stories can grab your attention and put you in another person’s shoes the way facts and statistics can’t. Getting absorbed in a compelling narrative is almost as good as learning through direct experience, but without the heartache or risk.

A story can immediately get to the heart of things, and if you’re precise about it, the story doesn’t have to be very long.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. My goal, in my teens and twenties, was to paint an accurate slice of life in under four hundred. Like an expert cartoonist creating an entire scene in your mind’s eye with just a few pen strokes, I learned to craft micro-stories that open minds and hearts within a single page.

When I’m interviewing my authors, they tell me anecdotes to make their point. (If they don’t, I ask for them!) These are often stories that are too private to be retold. But what I can do is embed the meaning of the stories into bite-sized fictional narratives. The characters and events that I then weave into the nonfiction books I write may be made up, but they convey truths that only story can tell.