What ghostwriters learn ...
A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog that was quite personal – I usually stick to ghostwriting things, but a few events / Tweets / attacks made it seem the right time to move away from that. The blog was, ostensibly, about the bestselling ‘Please, let me go’ by Caitlin Spencer, but it looked at how much has been going on in the background - from the difficulties we had to even find a publisher in the first place, to the impact it has had on both of us.
I’ve had some lovely feedback and it’s made me think about what I’ve learned from other projects – we hear a great deal about what people get from telling their story, whether that’s closure or coverage, satisfaction or sales; but what about the ghostwriters? What does the job do to them? I’m going to spend the next few weeks pondering this by reflecting on some of the books I’ve ghosted, and, hopefully, in doing that, will also help shed a little light on the relationship between both parties in this unusual relationship.
I’m often asked how I ended up in ghostwriting, so it makes sense to go back to the very first book. It was quite a convoluted path to get here – from a degree I never intended doing, which led me to a job I’d never thought would be an option for someone from my background, to another job which emphasised to me that there are some things you can never really escape (discrimination and sexism in my case), and then, oddly, back to what I had thought I would do to start with. And that was journalism. I didn’t get there through college or university, I got there through one of the jobs I never expected to do.
I began work as a non-clinical lecturer in obstetrics and gynaecology eight weeks before my second child was due. I had my baby four weeks early and went back when he was 2 weeks old. That is a book in itself, but what is relevant here is that, sitting in my office, aching for the baby I had left, wondering how quickly I could get back home to him before my heart and breasts exploded, I fired off a letter to a newspaper who had written a piece on birth practices.
To cut a long, dull story short, they offered me regular work on their op-ed pages, and, within 2 years, I had left academia for journalism. That all plodded along* (*code for = another book in there), and then, I interviewed a remarkable woman called Donna Ford. Donna had recently been through a court case in which her stepmother had been found guilty of colluding in the sexual abuse of Donna when she was a little girl. The case was a horrific one, but there was clearly a much bigger story to tell than could be held within 1200 words.
When Donna mentioned that she had thought of writing a book, it wasn’t something that immediately struck me as an option – to be honest, I didn’t even know what a ghostwriter was at this stage – but, life decided to put a few things together and, within weeks, I had a literary agent and an agreement with Donna to work on her memoir.
That first project became ‘The Step Child’, an international bestseller which is still doing well to this day. I can’t speak for Donna, but I do know what it did for me – it made me realise that writing could be a job, and that I would much rather tell the stories of other people than my own. Then, from that, I learned that you need to have three main attributes in this job and, that only by having them can you do justice to the stories you are privileged to tell.
Firstly, you can’t question the fact that you are able to write. There is so much more involved when you hold someone’s memories in your hand. The writing has to be a given – if it isn’t, then ghosting is not for you. This isn’t ego, it’s pragmatism; and pragmatism is a large part of ghostwriting.
Secondly, you can’t have any of that ego mentioned in the first point. There is a strong chance you will never see your name on the cover, that no one will ever know you were involved in the project (even if you get a fleeting mention in the acknowledgements, many people have no idea that the person thanked for ‘pulling bits of it together’ may very well have written it all). If you are in this for the glory of seeing your name inked on something, you’d be better off getting a tattoo.
Thirdly, always be interested. The things that got you into trouble at school, at work, most of your life – they are the things that make you a better writer, so they naturally help with ghostwriting too. Be curious, ask questions, don’t accept the first answer, dig deeper, be shameless.
I learned all of that very quickly even if I wasn’t necessarily aware of it. By the time that first book was over, I had been thrown into a completely new world, met some incredible people (met some absolute arseholes too), and knew that this was something which could keep me on my toes for years. Ghostwriting doesn’t happen in a vacuum – something I’ll talk about in my next blog – and I discovered this whole new world at a time when I needed to leave what I thought I would do forever.
That is the biggest lesson of all – that ghost and ghosted are on different versions of the same journey. We’re both learning, we’re both finding out about ourselves and the story as we put the words together.
If you have a story that will teach me something new, you know what to do – and, luckily, so do I.