In this season of the notorious Zoella ghostwritten novel, I’m getting deluged with questions from people who know I ghostwrite. What’s it like? Who have I done? Well, I can’t tell you that because it’s a trade secret. Also because to divulge the details might get me shot. (Though I can give advice on how you get into it – here’s my recent post on that.) As the nation sings Zoella, Zoella, I thought you might like this piece on ghostwriting, originally penned for Authors Electric.
Write what you know? Ho ho ho
An acquaintance from my dance classes read My Memories of a Future Life last month and has since been seeing me in a whole new light. I can tell by the thoughtful looks he gives me as we wince through stretches and wobble through pirouettes; an expression that says ‘I never knew you had that weird stuff going on…’
After class the other day he said to me: ‘that freaky scene with the hypnosis in the underground theatre… you must have been to something like that?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s research and imagination.’ He looked a little disappointed.
I stomp on your dreams
Had that taken away a little of the magic? Do readers prefer to think they’ve been led through your rearranged memoirs than the fruits of your persuasive art?
Some clearly do. There’s a long tradition that people who’ve had extraordinary lives sit down to dash off a novel. Many of them are not writers, and so the actual words came from people of ordinary amounts of courage and glamour, in charge of something no more racy than a blank page.
I know; I’ve done it. This is the lot of the ghostwriter.
The ghostwriter
A publisher introduces me to an ‘author’, and I write the novel they would if they could.
A surprising number of writers ghost for others, leaving behind our literary egos to live on the page as someone totally different. (It’s great discipline and allowed me to develop a method for getting novels ship-shape to order – all boiled down into my writing books.)
No, I didn’t do Jordan or Madonna. For some reason, I’ve trended in testosterone, with a run of adventurers and special forces types. I don’t know why. I don’t have a Y chromosome, for starters.
I now have an arsenal of rather wonderful faked experience. Just as you never forget how to ride a bicycle, I’ll never forget how to fly a plane, microlight, glider, hang-glider, helicopter. Or handle guns. Or hotwire various vehicles. I’m a dab hand with plastic explosive. I can make you believe I’ve abseiled out of helicopters into thin air, tracked assassins through jungles and India’s most impoverished slums, humanely killed a fatally wounded rhino and inhumanely despatched drug bosses. And done a whole rainbow of hallucinogenics.
In real life, my passport rarely gets any outings. But between the covers I’ve out-trekked Michael Palin.
After all that, hypnotising someone in an underground theatre is child’s play.
Fake to fake
Once, I went to meet my publisher and arrived in time to see my ‘author’, giving a presentation to the sales reps. Behind him was a wall of advance copies, floor to ceiling like bathroom tiles. I stood at the back and watched while he enthralled them with titbits of the characters and plot in the book I’d built on my hard drive.
We were faking, both of us. He was faking being a writer. I had faked being the soul who lived the stuff of novels. I watched for a while, then like a good ghost, slipped out, unseen.
It always amuses me to hear that maxim, ‘write what you know’.
Any questions? You can ask whatever you like, but I may have to answer with a seraphic smile. Or tape over my mouth.
Thanks for the pic NIck_Blick
Interested in learning more about ghostwriting? My professional course is here
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