How it works
The method does not change.
The schedule does.
Pick what you are making and the steps below become that one’s: who does the talking, how long it takes, and what arrives at the end.
They never have to sit down and write. Oshin calls them, and everyone else who was there, over as many conversations as it takes.
Twenty minutes with you
What you already know about her. What you have never asked.
Oshin starts calling
Her, first. Then whoever else was there. Nobody installs anything.
A finished chapter
Read it before you decide anything else.
It keeps going without you
Add a memory a year later and the book finds where it belongs.
A hardcover arrives
Or a second volume, when there is enough for one.
One Saturday of talking, hour by hour, and the rest is editing.
Where it started
Before the company. The part everyone skips.
The decision nobody agreed with
Oshin follows the thread, not the outline.
The year it nearly ended
The chapter you would never volunteer.
What you would tell someone starting
The part readers will quote.
A finished chapter, in your voice
Read it before you commit to anything else.
Two days with someone who keeps asking why, until the thing you know is out of your head and on a page.
How you actually do it
Walked through step by step, until the parts you skipped come out.
The cases that taught you
The one that went wrong. The one nobody else could fix.
What the textbook gets wrong
The received wisdom you quietly stopped following, and why.
What you would tell year one
The part your successor will actually read twice.
A finished chapter
Read it before you commit to anything else.
Ten minutes on Monday. A draft on Tuesday. Fifty-one weeks is a book.
It calls you
Ten minutes. What happened, what you read, what annoyed you.
It keeps the ones you would have lost
Four half-thoughts go into the bank. One becomes this week’s post.
A draft, in your inbox
In your words. You edit it like a document, not a prompt.
You post it
Or you do not, and it stays in the bank for a better week.
The bank fills up
After three months you have a body of work, not a feed.
Editing
You edit it like
a document.
The arrangement is where the work is, and it is where you have the most control. Change a line and it stays changed. Tap any sentence and hear the recording it came from.
She measured nothing. Flour went in by the handful.
She measured nothing the way her mother had.
at Seventy
The promise
Nothing is invented.
Oshin never fills a gap with something that merely sounds right. When two people remember the same night differently, both versions go in, and the book says who remembered what. Where nobody remembers, it says that too.
Every sentence in the book traces back to something someone actually said.
Before you go any further
The things everyone
asks us first.
01Is this ghostwriting?
No. A ghostwriter writes sentences you never said and you sign them. Oshin only ever assembles what was actually said, and shows you the source of each line. If you would not be comfortable saying publicly how the book was made, we have built the wrong thing.
02Will it sound like a machine?
People can tell when a machine wrote something, because machines converge on the same rhythms. The material here is a recording of a person talking, so the sentences keep their habits — including the long ones a chatbot would cut.
03Would I say publicly how it was made?
That is the right test, and it is the one we build against. Nobody signs prose they never said. If the honest answer is no, tell us, because we have got something wrong.
04What if they do not speak English well?
Then they should not have to. Oshin interviews in their language and keeps their words in the book alongside the translation. This is the part the American services do not do at all.
05How much work is this for me?
Twenty minutes to start. After that you approve things. You can spend ten hours editing if you are particular, and plenty of people are, but you do not have to.
06How long does it take?
A finished chapter in the first week. A book in a few weeks, depending on how many people we reach. It never has to end — people add to theirs for years and print a new volume.
07I am not a writer.
Good. Writers write badly about their own expertise, because they edit while they think. You will talk, the way you would to someone you were training, and the arranging happens afterwards.
08What if the talking is not enough?
For a whole life it usually is not. It is enough for a book. People come back and add to theirs for years, then print a second volume.
09Can I publish or sell it?
You own everything and you get print-ready files. What we do not do is promise you a bestseller or run a marketing campaign. That is a different business, and the firms selling it charge accordingly.
10Who can see it, and who owns it?
You do — recordings, drafts, everything. Encrypted end to end, never trained on, and yours to delete at any time, including everything already written.
So which one
are you making?
The mechanism is the same for all four. What changes is who does the talking, and how long it takes.