Ghostwriting and Confessions of a Ghostwriter by Andrew Crofts, and Fatherland and The Ghost by Robert Harris
Early on in Andrew Crofts’s fine introduction to the business of ghostwriting, he lays down a little law of the land. You must remember, he writes, that when ghosting, you are an instrument of the client. You are performing a service; and thus you must listen to them and do as they ask, and make their words — when they give them to you — say what they think they ought to say, not what you want to say. You are therefore only a facilitator, a bag man, a consigliere, a this, a that. A nothing, a dogsbody, the last person to be told anything. For Crofts, this is a positive advantage. You get to hear interesting stories; you get to write for a living; and you get to meet interesting people. What could be finer? Who but an ungrateful rube could ask for more?
Most professional ghostwriters do not get to meet interesting people. At least not per se. Everyone is theoretically interesting. What the professional ghostwriter mostly meets these days are people who need someone else to write for them. Or, in rare cases, those who could do it, but who are too busy. They’re the more interesting ones; but there aren’t many of them.
Robert Harris’s OK novel The Ghost was made into a really excellent film by Roman Polanski. I’d rather write about the film, and so I will. Ewan McGregor plays a ghostwriter — finished one contract, waiting for another, in a somewhat pathetic state of semi-bachelordom. And then, opportunity strikes: he is suggested — only suggested, mind — as a candidate to ghost the book of a recent prime minister (Blair without the complexity), played by Pierce Brosnan. The job has become available by what people call a happy accident (the previous ghost, a longstanding political apparatchik, has fallen off the side of a ferry and drowned, with both sea water and a bottle of whisky in him).
After an interview in which the American bosses seem a little taken with our hero — he talks about ghosting for illiterate pop stars and how his works have heart, not importance — he’s given another manuscript to read, mugged for it before he gets home, and put on a plane, still bruised, to go to Martha’s Vineyard and his next job. That is where the former prime minister is holed up: holed up like a certain German leader in his bunker. What happens next, I will leave to you to discover in your own time. The book’s just OK; the film is excellent. (And Fatherland, a wonderful alternative historical novel by Harris which is set in Germany in the 1960s, is possibly two hundred times better than The Ghost. Use that knowledge well.)
In Crofts’s other book, Confessions of a Ghostwriter, he is less modest and a little less restrained than he is in the guide for those new to the trade. He boasts about writing a classic misery memoir which sold millions (back when it was still possible for a book by someone other than Richard Osman to sell millions), and talks about all the rich guys who have sounded him out for jobs, and the soap opera actors who appear strangely normal when you meet them, and the footballers and businessmen and all the rest. All of these people are anonymised tastefully. And that’s not a bad thing, because honestly, the reader doesn’t care for a moment who they really are.
I’ve ghostwritten for a few years and I’ve been around. Never done a misery memoir. Never done a book for someone like Elton John. But I do commissions when people ask me: write long pieces out of directions of less than a sentence long; adapt my style to theirs; take their voice as recorded on my phone and turn it into paragraphs; all of that kind of thing. It’s an odd life. It’s an odd way to earn a living. You wonder sometimes why people need you, precisely why they need you. Is it to have someone to complain to — or about? Is it because you’re brilliant? Is it because they think they’re brilliant? I’ve never quite made up my mind.
Some just like to shout down the phone. A friend once said to me that the richer someone gets, the more they start acting like a baby: unable to do anything for themselves, reliant on others for even simple things, and therefore communicating without exception by screaming. There’s something to that.
Sometimes, I think that the people who employ me cannot type and they need someone to do it for them. Frustrations in the process often emerge. Others of them, without doubt, believe that once the book chapter or opinion piece or essay ghosted by me has appeared, it transforms mystically like the wine and wafer in the communion. After the sacrament has happened, things change: we have always been at war with Eastasia. And they in fact wrote the piece, the book chapter, the essay — and not the man who emailed them the document with all the words of the final version inside.
Who knows? It’s interesting to speculate about the psychology of ghostwriting clients: something Andrew Crofts does a little, Robert Harris does a little less, but neither of them really gets definitely sorted — completely nailed down.