We’re stuck with English

Last month, on the UG blog, we covered how modern communications technology facilitates international collaborations between people who rarely, or perhaps never, actually meet. There is a closely linked theme around the dominance of the English language. This has grown in recent decades. I recall visiting a trade fair in northern Italy in the late 1980s with many visitors from the eastern Mediterranean, where the common language was French. Nowadays, with the rise of China and Pacific trade, and the internationalization of business education based on the US model, English is the lingua franca (why isn’t there an English phrase for that?).

For those of us fortunate enough to be professional writers native in the tongue and UK-based, this does present us with advantages: many business-people, politicians and celebrities want to have their book published in London, and hire a local to help with the drafting and editing – or full ghosting, as the need arises. I have lived in Spanish-speaking countries for extended periods of time, giving me an insight into the experience of using a second language, which I think helps me empathize with clients using English at varying levels of fluency. Read more “We’re stuck with English” →

Draw on your life, if you’ve had one

While I nurtured vague ambitions to be an author as a young man, I made sure I combined impactful life experiences with learning the craft of journalism. After volunteering to help London’s homeless, I backpacked around Europe, taught myself Spanish in Chile, and worked in Nicaragua towards the end of the Sandinista regime.

This was my apprenticeship. Or so I assumed. Yet while I was accumulating what I thought were valuable insights, and trying to earn a living wage from journalism, the fashion in literature changed. Since the publication of The Remains of the Day and Atonement in the 1990s, the most celebrated novelists have published, almost exclusively, works based on detailed historical research. The trend has continued, with recently garlanded books such as The Essex Serpent and Lincoln in the Bardo, while On Chesil Beach gets the motion picture treatment. Read more “Draw on your life, if you’ve had one” →

A book by any other name

It’s been noted before in this column that a moment professional authors dread is when someone from another profession comments: ‘Oh, I’m going to write a book when I retire/find the time. Everyone says I should.’

Ours is the only profession that other folk tend to think that they can do, irrespective of qualifications, natural ability or training. Patiently, we often have to explain that penning a book is usually not straightforward, and that a promising idea for a story does not automatically qualify you as author.

Being a professional writer is a privilege, however, and one cannot impose qualification thresholds prior to being published, because it would place an illiberal restriction on freedom of speech and thought. It is a profession, but it is not like architecture or medicine, where there is a codified and objectively agreed set of professional standards, and where unqualified practice tends to have serious consequences, such as life-changing injuries and premature death. Read more “A book by any other name” →

Precision-engineered language

In the late 1980s, or thereabouts, a Portuguese minister was first item on the BBC television news, having complained about being ‘deceived’ by Margaret Thatcher, at an EU meeting. He appeared rather baffled to be in the studio, played down the significance of the remarks, and the presenter quickly moved on to the next item. It is very possible that he merely meant to say that he felt decepção (disappointment) at the then British Prime Minister’s stance.

There exists something of a myth that, because language evolves continually, and many words have multiple or elastic definitions, therefore one can never be precise in language. I assert that there is such a thing as an error of vocabulary; that dictionaries exist for a very good reason, and that it is a professional, polite and smart discipline to know the formal definitions, and use them. Read more “Precision-engineered language” →

The ghost as record producer

A comment one often hears about a famous person’s biography, especially if they are a celebrity not particularly famous for academic prowess, is that the book was ‘really’ written by either a journalist or specialist ghostwriter under cloak of anonymity. The default belief of how ghosting works is that the celeb records his or her story into some recording equipment, hands it over to the journo, then returns to do their singing/football/baking a cake on TV or whatever, and a few months later a polished biog surfaces.

Maybe some are indeed penned in this way, but by no means all, and this pattern may actually be rare. My experience has been that there is a huge grey area between editing and full ghosting. That’s where much of my work lies. It’s a close collaboration rather than a complete outsourcing. Read more “The ghost as record producer” →