Emma R.

Most people I write for don't think they have a book in them. They usually do. It's just buried under the suspicion that nobody would read it. I'm a memoir and non-fiction ghostwriter who learned the trade getting Heston Blumenthal and René Redzepi onto the page and screen. Recently I wrote From Concept to Cultural Icon for the founder of a hospitality group in Asia. Now I'm ghostwriting Son of a Baker, a chef's memoir. I've been shaping stories since blogs were the new frontier and Netflix still mailed DVDs in red envelopes. I started as a food writer, then spent eight years in television. I was a producer on the BAFTA-nominated BBC series In Search of Perfection and co-wrote the books. That's where I learned to listen to what wasn't being said and to create the conditions where people revealed more of themselves than they'd planned. From television I went to Phaidon Press as Commissioning Editor of Food. I edited Massimo Bottura's Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef and made the film that went with it. My list also included Where Chefs Eat and the New York Times bestseller Mexico: The Cookbook. My job was to make authors with strong voices and even stronger opinions comfortable enough to share what they knew, then get it into print without losing them. Whatever the book, I'm asking the same questions from the first conversation to the final draft. What have we actually got here? What is this story really about — not what happened, but what it means? Is the structure serving the material or fighting it? What's missing that nobody has noticed yet? You're not hiring someone to turn the handle. You're hiring someone who cares whether the work is the best it can be. Not everything I write is memoir. This year I wrote a fictional cold-case murder file, and I've scripted a mixed-media live show for a country singer. A chef's memoir and a murder file look different on the surface. Underneath, they require the same thing: the ability to listen at depth, find the spine of a story, and build it into something that holds. Story is story. I do story consults too, for people who aren't sure yet whether there's a book in it. Before you hire, I'm always happy to have a conversation. The most important thing to me is that whatever we make together feels unmistakably yours. Services - Memoir and personal narrative - Ghostwriting across non-fiction - Story consults: is there a book here? - Developmental editing - Scriptwriting for film, television, and live shows