The ghost in the book

What it's like to be a ghostwriter

On Saturday 27 June, I will be celebrating my birthday with seven paid subscribers. There will be some poetry. There will be conversation. There will be coffee and cake (or a sandwich if you’re not into cake).

We’re meeting in a private room at my favourite Cape Town bakery. The treat’s on me. (Unless you go mal, in which case, there is a certain amount above which you will have to pay for your feast.)

I enjoyed my birthday with subscribers two years ago, where we had a guerrilla writing morning at the market. This time, we’re not writing, we’re chatting.

Contact me privately if you’d like to help me celebrate another year of living and life and writing and poetry and people. Because there is but one luxury for the absurd hero, as Albert Camus said – ‘that of human relations’.

PS: Please don’t say you’re coming and then don’t come. I can only take seven people and I can’t take a deposit from you to secure your word. Just make your word your word, and don’t not rock up. It’s first come, first serve, so if you say you’re coming, and then find you can’t, let me know so I can invite the next person on the list.

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Ego and non-ego in the ghostwriting relationship

Yiannis’s* architectural Pompadour fade hardly moved no matter how much he gestured while we spoke. Below the steep confection of his thick, black hair was a dazzling, mile-wide smile.

He seemed to own several pairs of high-end frames. He had entered what my eye guy once called ‘the optometrist’s golden mile’ of his forties a decade earlier. He was youthful though, in both looks and attitude.

Words streamed from him in private conversation with as much ease and confidence as he displayed on the many world stages he appeared on. He was seldom in one place for longer than two weeks, so I would meet with him online. The view behind him was always glamorous: palm trees, high rises, jungle.

I wrote two books for him, ghosting in and then out of his life. He no longer ‘writes books’, so we have no reason to meet anymore. No one but he, I and his publisher knew of our connection.

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto, 1901 (Credit: The Courtauld Institute of Art) PHOTO: BBC

Ghostwriting is a peculiar undertaking. You are a vessel in which someone pours themselves. If you are lucky, they’re the kind of person who has harnessed their thoughts and the events of their life to some sort of philosophy of being. If you are extra lucky, they are not so handcuffed to their philosophies that they respond defensively to challenges.

For each of the men I have written books for (I’ve never ghostwritten a book for a woman before), I have marvelled at their patience and their grace. It is a long while before they see any of the results of their openness with me – I who started off a complete stranger to them. They tell me difficult things. They tell me, often shyly, about their small triumphs.

Over meeting after meeting, a rapport grows. Trust, which had to be gambled on at the beginning, becomes as solid as the seats we sit on when we talk.

Trust expands with the duration of our relationship. I find I can tease them a little. I can challenge them. If we are to be equal partners – my skill for your money – they can’t be talking to a sycophant. Nor will I work for people who surround themselves with people they treat as serfs and lackeys, or who bark at people.

Sometimes I find myself asking them things that are way beyond comfortable. I watch, almost wide-eyed, as they pop back round from our shared surprise at my cheek to formulate a thoughtful answer.

Sometimes I tell them, gently, that their thinking is a little outdated or rigid or flawed. I spar with their assumptions. I push back.

Being a reader helps. My clients are successful in their fields. My field is books. When you read a lot, you accidentally know a lot, which means you can question people from a solid position.

How is such a relationship built, I sometimes wonder. Where does trust spring from and how does such a delicate flower continue to exist through months of work together?

I think that I have worked out why my ghostwriting clients have such grace with me. It is because initially, I always only listen.

‘I have invisible little ears all over my body,’ a therapist once told me. I know now what he meant. Listening is an activity that requires the whole body.

Therapists and analysands know that listening stirs medicine.

I am not a passive amanuensis though.

I take note as I take notes. I respond to what they say, connect new information to a story they told me long before, ask whether the person they are referring to now is the same one that did this or that thing in another story they told me.

I watch their body language, where their eyes go, how they shift and shuffle. I point out patterns they seem to have missed.

Questioning is an activity that requires the whole self too.

Every person I’ve interviewed in my long career comes into every interview with my ghostwriting clients. Every book, every article, every experience, every adventure, every conflict, and each of my own difficulties and small triumphs comes into the room.

The client seldom asks me anything about myself. I remain a ghost to them, and often to the people who will one day read their book. But the traces of my experiences are woven through the sentences because of the osmotic magic of two minds thinking together.

Questioning, like listening, requires the whole self.

The challenge in ghostwriting a book, is to capture the way the author – not the writer – sounds, but the creative result of the book is always a collaboration between two psyches.

There are ghostwriting services one can find via writing agencies. When you work for these agencies, they match you with a client and they give you a list of questions you have to ask the client in order to write the book for them.

How does one deduce, from a standard set of questions, the shape of a person’s experience?

Bureaucracy never captures anything but fact. It exists to spit out some document at the end.

A book about someone’s life is not a certificate of existence.

A book is a different kind of validation. It’s a relationship between author and writer, whether author and writer two people, or reside in only one body.

Is ghostwriting a book an ego undertaking? Show me a creative project that isn’t.

A book by an author with no ego would be a soggy non-thing. The question is not one of ego; but one of the tempered ego. An ego neither propped up by false humility nor made impenetrable by the devil of absolute certainty.

The men I have written books for have been spectacularly successful in their work lives. They have deep connections to the world in which they move and have had enough blow-back from life to know a thing or two.

What they know is what we summon in our meetings. What they know, we harness. What they know, we net. What they know, we turn into a story.

The story is passed on.

This is how humans have always survived: by receiving stories about what is known.

Of all my clients, only Yiannis has a public profile he has to primp. He cuts a fine figure on stage. His minimalist style – almost Japanese in its simplicity – must make it easy for him to pack for his endless travel from one country to the next.

He is good-looking and well-groomed.

Depending on where you stand on the matter of outer appearances, he is either a picture of enviable poise or of performative confidence.

What I see is human being I have laughed and quarrelled with. Who loves dogs, and visits his mother regularly because he likes being with her. Who does good things he doesn’t tell the world about in his books or from the stage.

He’s just a guy.

With some books he once used the ghost of me to write for him.

*Yiannis is not his real name.

With love,

as always,

K.

PS: Don’t forget to let me know if you’re coming for cake and coffee to celebrate my birthday.