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When I meet a new client, I am often greeted by the familiar: a hallway with coats hung neatly, the warm waft of tea, the clink of a cup gently returned to its saucer. There is something about these small rituals that anchor us before the story begins. A shared nod to the ordinary, the lived-in, the half-spoken. But underneath the politeness and social cues, there is something deeper waiting. I am there to listen, yes, but more than that, I am there to shape. To reassemble the elements of a life not as a chronicle of facts, but as something more intimate. Fictionalising a life doesn’t mean creating something false. It means finding the truest shape for a thing that defies easy explanation.

Some stories are fractured. Others are too complete, too tidy to be believed. My work—whether as a ghostwriter, a memoir writer, or something between—is not to preserve the life as it was told to me. It is to make the life feel whole, even if it never truly was. Especially then.

Clients rarely come to me simply to recount events. They come to find out what those events mean. This is the difference between biography and story. The biography writer might note the year someone moved to London, the address, the job title. But the fiction ghostwriter, the memoir writer, listens for something else: what it cost them to leave, what they thought they’d find, and what silence met them instead. What does it mean to leave one life and enter another, uncertain if it will ever feel like home?

In those conversations, hesitations matter as much as admissions. I have learned to pay attention to what is said only after a pause. What is framed as a digression, but isn’t and the unremarkable details that carry unbearable weight. “I always made breakfast for them, even after the divorce.” “He never called on Sundays.” “I never told my mother.” These are the places where the story changes. These are the truths we fictionalise not to obscure but to clarify.

Sometimes clients worry about the mess of it all. That their memories contradict themselves. That some parts are vivid while others are fog. But this is where the story begins. Not in certainty, but in feeling. The texture of experience, rather than its straight line. Writing a life is not about coherence. It is about resonance. And often, it is the fragments that echo longest.

To fictionalise is to honour the emotional truth when the literal one fails us. It is a way to arrange the chaos into something with shape, without smoothing its edges too much. As a ghostwriter in London, I often encounter people whose lives are busy with outward accomplishment but quiet inside. People who have never said certain things aloud. And suddenly, in a living room or on a video call, they do. And then the work begins.

It is delicate work. It’s not about drama or embellishment. It’s about selecting the details that illuminate a life. The way someone touched a book spine as they spoke of a childhood teacher. The quiet pride in a failed business they still believe in. The tone change when talking about a sibling, an ex, a version of themselves long buried.

In this way, I do not write about the client. I write as the client. That is the task—to become their mirror and their architect. And it requires trust. A willingness to let someone else hold the pieces for a while, turn them in their hand, and then lay them out anew.

Fictionalising a life isn’t for everyone. But for those who choose it, it offers something rare: not just to be remembered, but to be understood. To see their life not just as it was, but as it felt. And perhaps, to see it for the first time.