Eyes widen at parties when I tell people I am a ghostwriter, as if I’ve admitted I do something sneaky and slightly nefarious that’s barely legal. What could be more interesting?
This happened the other night. I answered a lot of questions. People think this is rare and exotic.
You are reading ghost writers all the time. On the non-fiction best-seller list, anything by an actor, politician, athlete, business person, or scientist was probably written by someone else.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Otherwise the books wouldn’t be written or wouldn’t be any good. These folks generally don’t know how to write books and wouldn’t have time to write one if they did.
Some give a ‘with’ or ‘as-told-to’ credit to the writer while others try to hide the help as much as they can, relegating the person who wrote the first draft to a helper in a long list of people in the acknowledgments. I’ve been credited both ways.
The only time this role bothers me is when the client insists on going the wrong direction, hiding the truth or skewing the story for ends other than serving the reader (such as politics). When that happens, I give my advice and move on. It’s not my book.
But those problems are rare.
Much more often, the process is intimate and rewarding. Telling a person’s life in his or her own words begins with learning that story and its most important lessons. Through many sessions of interviews, insights often develop that even the client was unaware of.
I’ve often been compared to a therapist. I’ve gotten to know some clients as well as anyone in their lives knows them. I’ve heard secrets that no one else knows.
My job is to understand the author deeply enough to take on their voice in a way that sounds true from inside their own head. On many occasions, clients have come to believe that they wrote the words I wrote for them.
We’re not fooling anyone. When the words are true and personal to the client—the words he or she would have written if they had known how—then it really is their book.
That’s extremely satisfying to me. It means I’ve reached this person on the deepest level, I have made a close friend for life, and I’ve helped this new friend connect to many others, creating a legacy that many consider to be among their most important in life.
Of course, I work in may other modes, too. My collaborative writing practice includes coaching and co-authoring, as well as the deep editing of being a book doctor—and really whatever help a client needs. But I’m not ashamed of being a ghost writer. It’s not sneaky at all.