What Makes a Book Good?

We all love a good book – a book that makes us think, laugh, cry, wonder, marvel, a book whose characters or ideas or images remain with us long after we have finished it.

There are plenty of critics to tell us whether any particular book is good or bad. But look up the reviews for a book panned by the literati and dozens of people will say they loved it, because what’s good to you isn’t necessarily the same as what’s good to me. So, isn’t ‘good’ in the eye, or mind, or heart of the beholder?

Are the classics good? Undoubtedly, and yet so many of us struggle to get through them. They may be great literature, and they have brought joy to many, but I’ve lost count of the people who admit that they couldn’t actually finish Tolstoy, or Dickens, or Trollope.

A couple of years back a man named Pavlos came over from Egypt to work with me on a memoir of his father, who had, in his day, been a distinguished international endocrinologist. However, when we sat down together to begin going through his memories of his father, Pavlos, himself in his seventies, couldn’t remember much. In fact, after half an hour of peering at a scrap of paper on which he’d written a few notes, he declared himself done.

What to do?

We started again and over several days began to stitch together moments, memories, thoughts, colours, scenes – anything and everything that Pavlos could recall from his childhood and his father’s extraordinary life in Cairo.

Eventually what we had was a short book of vignettes; little passages, just a page or two long in some cases, each of which captured, in no particular order, an aspect of his father – his humour, his dedication, his fussiness about meals, his camping trips in the desert with 12-year-old Pavlos, his dash in the middle of the night to treat a prince and his kindness to patients who could only pay him in chickens and honey.

I had been afraid that Pavlos might be disappointed, as the book was so short, but I need not have worried. This book was, for him, the best book in the world. He added in old black and white photographs of his father and when it was complete he was so excited about it that he went to the printer on the Isle of Wight to watch it roll off the presses.

Once he had the copies, he gave them to his children and grandchildren and to everyone who had ever known his father as well as to the libraries and medical schools across the world that his father had worked in or visited.

This was, in the end, a very good book. For Pavlos it was the best of books and, after he sent it out, he received many warm messages from people who had known and loved his father. The book was itself an act of love, and what can be better than that?

For me it confirmed what I already suspected – if you love a book, it’s a good book. And since every book is loved by someone, it follows then that all books are good!

Of course they are, because books are wondrous things.

Prince Harry and the Agassi man

Right. OK. Scrap draft blog. Here we go again. Prince Harry’s announced he’s working on a book about “the experiences, adventures, losses and life lessons that have helped shape him” and ghostwriting’s back on the front pages.

Speculation about Harry’s advance puts it at £15 million to £20 million. A fair chunk of that will probably go to J R Moehringer, the prince’s chosen ghostwriter, whose previous collaborators have included wild child tennis star Andre Agassi (“I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion – and always have”) and Nike co-founder Phil Knight.

Moehringer is a boyish 56-year-old author and journalist. His own 2005 memoir (presumably written unaided) was called The Tender Bar and is currently being filmed, directed by George Clooney. Clooney, of course, is a friend of Harry and Meghan and it is thought that this is the connection that led to Moehringer getting the princely ghosting job. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

The great advantage of finding a ghostwriter by personal recommendation is trust. Moehringer has a reputation for coaxing dramatic bombshell revelations from his authors, especially, it seems, when the matter in question is difficult relationships between fathers and sons. But presumably the rules of engagement have been set and everyone is happy with how things are progressing, though the Prince of Wales may be keeping his royal fingers crossed.

Harry and Moehringer have already been working on the project for a year and a first draft is expected in October, so much of the spadework must already have been done. There may be surprises in store for the rest of us – and for other members of Harry’s extended family – but the Duke of Sussex would not have gone public about the forthcoming book if he didn’t think it was going well.

But how do you find the right ghostwriter for your project if you don’t have George Clooney’s endorsement to guide you?

Even at a less exalted level, nothing beats a word of mouth testimonial from a friend or contact who has worked with a particular writer. If you assume a basic level of experience and competence, which should be easy enough to establish by looking at samples of previous work, there are still a lot of less tangible qualities you will want to ask about.

Is your prospective collaborator responsive, organised, reliable and enthusiastic? World-weary cynicism can get you down over a period of months. Is he or she energetic and optimistic? Many – perhaps most – book projects go through a sticky patch from time to time, and it helps if your ghostwriter can lift you when your spirits are flagging. Was it fun? There’s a lot of hard work needed, from both author and ghost, but a book that’s grim to write will probably be grim to read. Above all, there’s the key question: “Would you choose to work with this ghost again?”

If you can’t get this kind of first-hand recommendation from someone you know, or a friend of a friend, you could always pick a book you’ve enjoyed reading in your broad genre or subject area and try to contact the author, via social media or a note to the publisher.

There is a possible downside to this, as an author who has sweated cobs to write a good book entirely alone, without external help, might feel peeved at your assumption that a ghostwriter was used. To be frank, though, there are not many around these days. Most people who have achieved eminence in a field other than literature or journalism choose to work with ghostwriters to make their books as polished and readable as they can be, just as they use agencies to handle their advertising and accountants to prepare their tax returns.

In the end, though, if you can’t get a personal tip-off and you’ve lost George Clooney’s number, there is one other way to be sure you are working with a suitably professional and resourceful ghost. You could ask a group of ghostwriters who, among their peers, they would be confident to recommend.

That, effectively, is what you are doing if you get in touch with United Ghostwriters.  We are a small, elite group – currently just 14 of us – who work independently as a loose collective, meeting several times a year and exchanging contacts, opportunities, gossip and ideas. There’s no boss, no structure, no P&L – just a shared faith in each other’s abilities and expertise. If you want to know who’s good at doing this stuff, it’s easy. Just ask the professionals.   

Ian Shircore’s latest book is So Brightly at the Last: Clive James and the Passion for Poetry (RedDoor Press)

On the Shoulders of Giants

Where do stories come from? Very often from other stories. You read something, which sparks off ideas in your own head. They may be as basic as “I could do better than that”, or you may think of a new approach to take, or you may just want something out there that you yourself would want to read. Robert Muchamore wanted something his teenage nephew would want to read and ended up with the CHERUB series. Bear Grylls and others have done similar.

If you’re really lucky, then you get to play with someone else’s toys. Author Kate Saunders, like me, loved E. Nesbit’s magical stories as a child: Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet, and (less famous, but in my opinion the best) The Story of the Amulet. And, like me, she did the maths and worked out that the brothers in those books were exactly the right age to go and die horribly on the Western Front a few years later. My imagination at this point went more R.C. Sherriff than E. Nesbit, so it’s probably as well that I never tried to write down what was in my head. She, however, wrote Five Children on the Western Front, which is exactly the story Nesbit would have written, in the same tone and style as the originals, including the witty things that Nesbit had to say about gender and class – which probably went straight over the heads of the target audience, but not of any adults who might be reading the stories to them. She sticks to Nesbit’s style and ethos and still manages to tell a moving WW1 story.

What really makes it work is that it develops the original story. You feel you have moved along rather than just retrodden the same ground. Any novel should really be about the most important thing that has happened to the protagonist(s) at that point in their lives.

This is what I wanted to do with H.M.S. Barabbas, the further adventures of Jim Hawkins after Treasure Island. There are many sequels to Treasure Island and every one I have ever seen is essentially a return to Treasure Island, even though Jim’s last words in the first book are that “Oxen and wain-ropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island”. I thought it would be far more interesting to see what Jim – a young man with a taste for adventure, a fortune in the bank, and a tendency to moral compromise – would do next that did not involve going back there.

Of course, there is the small detail that if your favourite author died less than seventy years ago then their work is subject to copyright. It may still be, if other parties have since got hold of it. You can write what you like in the privacy of your own home, but you may not distribute it; or if you do (for example, J.K. Rowling is known to be very relaxed about fans doing exactly that; other copyright holders are less forgiving) then you may not make money out of it.

This is not a problem. Change all the names, file off the serial numbers and make it your own. Fantasy writer Terry Brooks made his name with The Sword of Shannara, which, with the best will in the world, is essentially Lord of the Rings-lite. But (crucially) he mixed in enough original ideas of his own that he was able to develop a successful fantasy series out of it, with further novels that went in a very different direction.

Alex Rider (and CHERUB) would not exist without James Bond, James Bond would not exist without Richard Hannay … The sequence goes back, probably to tales of heroic chivalric knights, and beyond. They all build on what their predecessors did, but do it differently. There’s no reason why the stories piling up in your head should not be the latest stage in your own favourite genre’s evolution. And if you want a hand getting them out, just ask.

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.