Voice is not how you write. It is how you think.
The part of ghostwriting nobody believes until they see it.
Everyone gets this backwards. They think voice is a style. A tone. Some seasoning you add at the end to make the words sound like you. Pick your adjectives, drop in a catchphrase, job done.
It is not that. Voice is the shape of your thinking. The order you reach for things in. What you put first because it matters most to you, and what you leave out because to you it is obvious. Two people can describe the same afternoon and you would know, blind, which account was whose. Not because of the words. Because of what each of them noticed.
So when I write as someone, I am not copying their words. Words are the easy part. I am learning the shape. How they build an argument when they are sure of it. How they hedge when they are not. The little run-up they always do right before they say the true thing, the one they do without knowing they do it.
You hear it clearest when people stop performing. On a call, halfway through a tangent, someone forgets to be professional and says the real thing in nine plain words. That is the voice. Not the tidy paragraph they email over afterwards. The nine words on the call.
The whole job is catching those nine words and building the rest of the page out to meet them.
Which is why voice cannot be faked by adding flavour on top. You cannot season your way to sounding like a person. The person is underneath, in the thinking, or they are not on the page at all.
Run this test on yourself. Say the thing out loud to a friend first. Then write it down. If the written version lost something, that gap is where your voice went. Everything I do lives in closing that gap.
Tell me the nine words you would say on the call. We can start there.
