Why You Should Never Ask A Writer To Write Your Story
When you write, people will excitedly tell you their story ideas and declare that you should write their idea or help them write the idea. Please don’t be one of those people.
It’s Yours, Not Mine
Other people will not be able to do your idea justice. The writer is not a mind-reader, and whatever your idea is will have to be translated from your mind to the writer. It can be done, but it is difficult and it won’t be exactly your vision.
Besides which, your project doesn’t excite the writer nearly as much as you think. That lack of enthusiasm will carry over to the project, and you don’t need that boredom sinking it.
There Are Other Experts To Ask
If you really feel like someone should write down your idea but feel like an expert would be the better choice for it, you can hire a ghostwriter.
Ghostwriters get paid in cash money, and they get paid a lot of cash money. Typically, they get paid between $15,000 to $100,000 a piece.
Writers working on their own projects do not appreciate being asked to ghostwrite for free. It’s a time-consuming, difficult job that deserves remuneration. And you are, in effect, asking for a free service when you start babbling to your writer friend about how they should write down your idea.
Get Off Your Lazy Rump
My very first suspicion when a non-writer asks me to ‘work with them’ on their idea is that I will be stuck with doing all the, you know, work.
Non-writers who want to team up with writers have a slight idea of how time consuming and difficult writing something is.
That is why they have not started on it themselves. They would really rather someone else put fingers to keyboard. They would definitely prefer someone else do the brain-cudgeling work of reorganizing a piece so it makes sense and isn’t just brain-droppings on a page. And boy-howdy, would they love it if someone else would do the tedious job of grammar-correction, spell-checking, and other tasks that make a work readable.
Writers would prefer to do all that work for projects they care about, or for which they get paid a great deal. Preferably both.
Your story idea interests you and you alone. If you don’t care enough about it to put in the effort/pony up the money, don’t ask other people to do so.