End Game

It is commonly accepted that starting a book is the most difficult part. It’s certainly a tough moment when you confront the blank page at the top of which stands the legend: Chapter 1. But by the time you reach that stage, you will have done a lot of thinking, a lot of planning, a lot of research. If you’re working with a ghost, you’ll have done hours of interviews and had lots of discussions about what’s going to go in. And of course, if you are working with a ghost writer, that first sentence on the blank page is his/her problem, not yours!

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Not just for the Rich and Famous

I’m currently working on two projects with authors no one will have heard of. That doesn’t make them nobodies. Far from it. The more I have worked with them, the more I have grown to respect them and what they have done that they want a wider audience to know about.

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Trust

When Ernest Hemingway was asked how you could know whether you could trust someone, he growled: ‘Trust ‘em’, before banging his empty glass on the El Floridita bar, trusting that the barman would give him another daiquiri as perfect as the last.

At least, that’s how I imagine it: a casual but typically succinct and challenging response; a brush-off to send a would-be worshipper on his way.

Not that it’s not good advice. I have followed it myself – albeit with mixed results. An unpromising tenant (on paper) has turned into a lifelong friend. But another ‘trust him’ punt ended in one of my flats being turned into a cannabis factory. Embarrassing and costly, but not the end of the world, and on balance, trusting the Hemingway precept has served me well.

But I wouldn’t trust it in more serious scenarios. Take a rope. Would anyone just trust it to take their weight, or would they test it in some way before throwing it over the edge of the cliff and climbing down it? When it’s a matter of life, I imagine we’re all rather more circumspect.

And this is at the heart of the relationship between the ghostwriter and the client who is indeed trusting them with his or her life. If it’s going to work, it has to reach levels of intimacy normally associated with therapy. Interviews will need to go deep to get at the full story, and this may mean uncomfortable questions. But the hope is it will make for a much better book – and, again, hopefully, prove therapeutic.

Once trust is established, the levels of candour can be surprising. Ghosts can find themselves entrusted with secrets that would come as a shock to close family members, let alone the wider circle of friends and colleagues. Obviously nearer the end of the project, the question of how much sensitive material really needs to see the light of day comes into focus. And all responsible ghostwriters will warn of the dangers of being sued for libel. It’s not necessarily true that all publicity is good publicity.

Of course, trust is a two-way street. Which is why the initial telephone conversation is so important. The client needs to feel that his or her life will be in safe hands; and the ghost has to assess whether the relationship is going to work. While we will bend over backwards to realise the vision of the proposed book, everyone has experienced clients who prove difficult to satisfy, change their mind about the direction of travel, and in some instances simply disappear like mountain goats into the mist.  (I still have on file a contract signed by a client with whom I spent hours on the phone. I’m still waiting for the initial payment. Suing for breach of contract is not a great start for a ghostwriting collaboration.)

But to end on an optimistic note. Only last week I got a call from a friend of a friend who recently lost his father through motor neurone disease. A heartbreaking story, especially as the diagnosis came late, meaning his dad was still working long after he should have stopped. His son had kept a diary of his painful decline. Could it be turned into a book?

Send a sample, I replied, and a little while later I responded in a text saying Yes it could be turned into a book and that I was happy to help with the process. The writing was direct, uncomplicated, and the narrative thread straightforward. The old English teacher in me felt for my red biro, but it won’t need much more than a light edit. I’m not charging for this little service (the original friend has bought me too many beers over the years); it’s a good project and will certainly be some help to those who find themselves in the same crushing predicament.

And the book I am just about to start writing came about through another phone conversation. This one was initiated by me in response to a request for guidance by a potential client to United Ghostwriters. It didn’t seem promising, but as there was a phone number, I thought I’d report the bad news in person.

Half an hour later, things had changed. The author is quite a personality and I started to see ways in which a rather unorthodox book could satisfy his desire for a memoir as well as find a potential audience.

I wrote a chapter synopsis and a pitch and sent it to a specialist agent, who turned it down. I then sent it to my own publisher, just to get his opinion, and he phoned back within an hour saying he’d like to publish it. Contract in the post!

It doesn’t often happen like that, but the importance of that first telephone conversation cannot be emphasised enough.

Make that call. You’ve got nothing to lose.

Trust me!

The Editing Option

A few weeks ago, I got a book through the post. Nothing unusual about that. But once I realised which book this was, I pulled the packaging apart with more than my usual gusto. Which, given that it was a sturdy business book with lots of graphs, boxed information panels, Venn diagrams, a wide range of different fonts and a plethora of bullet points, was out of character. So what made it of such particular interest to me?

You’ve guessed it: I helped to write it. Or rather, I helped the author to write it. Apart from doing a book from scratch, which is what people normally expect ghostwriters to do, we also assist people who have already – or would like to have – written their own book but feel the need of a bit of professional support and advice to see it through to completion. This is loosely called ‘editing’, but there are varying degrees of involvement from ‘invisible mending’ – light tidy-up of a manuscript before it is sent off to the publisher – to what I think of as a ‘heavy edit’. This can extend to a total restructuring of the book and often requires as much work as writing the whole thing from the start. It’s a bit like taking on a building project which hasn’t quite gone to plan.

My prospective client, as she was then, rang just as I’d taken a mouthful of my late breakfast. In my own defence, she was a little late making the call, but it could have been a bad start. However as we both ended up laughing, it was a good start. Her project had already reached the manuscript stage, and there was a publisher waiting for the finished text with a view to publication in a matter of months. The text contained a wealth of knowledge and experience in the client’s particular field, but something told her it wasn’t ‘there’ yet.

I said I’d have to look at it before I could assess what was needed, and she sent it over – nearly three hundred pages of it. And she was right; it wasn’t right. But was I the right person to put it right? This wasn’t my field at all. But sometimes not knowing things can be helpful.

I could see at a glance that the book could be more reader-friendly, and after a final discussion we agreed to go ahead, with me throwing out ideas as to how it could be a more successful reading experience.

We agreed to restructure it. The opening chapter just didn’t seem the right entry point. It’s one of my mantras: every author starts with the huge privilege of the reader’s attention. But lose that and you never get it back. So every book, whatever the genre, whatever the target audience, has to start by engaging the reader, setting out its stall, making us want to read on and keep reading.

A book also has to feel relevant. There are a lot of business books out there. This one had to stand out. One thing was apparent: we had to set the wisdom, experience and guidance on offer in the context of the pandemic, rather than assuming Covid would soon be under control and destined to become a distant memory. As we can see clearly now, that is not going to happen, and living with Covid is going to impact all aspects of life, particularly business. This book would be the first in its field to be published post-pandemic, so we had to view that as a potential advantage, not a handicap: a new guide to a new world.

But there was something else I felt the book needed. There were references to the client’s personal experiences with her customers over the years. Some of these were clearly highly stressful, not to say dramatic. I thought it would be helpful if they could be expanded and fleshed out a bit. This meant more writing for someone who had already written an awful lot of words already, but she agreed to give it a go.

I waited for the outcome, not knowing what to expect. But when the first example of what we ended up calling her ‘homework’ came through, I was delighted. It was lively, interesting – gripping even – and certainly illustrative of points made in the text. The client was pleased and surprised as well, and ended up writing over half a dozen really engaging inserts built on personal experience.

Of course, these pieces then had to be fitted into the body of the book, so that made extra work for both of us. But as we hurtled towards the deadline, working longer and longer hours, sending revised and re-revised chapters to and fro, there was a strong feeling of common purpose. When it came to the last weekend before scheduled submission on the Monday, we both worked very long shifts but got it over the finishing line.

There was a lot more to be done, of course. The publishers took over, re-edited, designed it – the usual process. Which is why I was so keen to see what they had made of it. And it looked fabulous. The design was great, as were the illustrations that were new to me. The personal stories also looked fine, set slightly apart and highlighted with a light grey background. I turned the pages with a gentle glow of satisfaction – which is the perfect reward for doing your job.

Ghostwriters For Real!

A few weeks back I opened my copy of The Author, journal of the Society of Authors. For the first time I could remember in over twenty years of membership, the magazine contained not one but two articles on ghostwriting. Talk about waiting for a bus.

Not that I had been, particularly, in that although I have been a published author for three decades, I have only recently become a ghostwriter. Anyway, I read the articles by Tom Henry and Andrew Crofts with interest and much agreement. One stand-out question was: ‘Are ghostwriters real writers?’ The answer was a resounding Yes. But the fact that anyone had posed it struck me as curious, to put it mildly.

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