Authors as "Wraith-like Creatures - Andrew Crofts

On a recent Guardian blog the literary commentator, Robert McCrum, analysed some of the "genres" in the book publishing market. One of the genres he identified was "Ghost Lit".

"A surprising number of successful books," he wrote, "(bestselling memoirs especially) are written by ghost writers. But there are also ghosted novels, too. By definition these wraith-like creatures have no names and are known only to their fellow spooks – and the publishers who depend on them."

It then occurred to me that “wraith-like creatures”, pretty well sums up the whole experience of being an author.

Sitting in a Soho editing suite a couple of weeks ago, watching the rushes from the filming of my novel “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride”, (freely available on   http://www.wattpad.com and soon to be Kindled by its original publisher), I was struck first by the changes which the scriptwriters had made to the original story in order to make it work as an episodic drama. Some of the book’s characters had vanished while others had been invented, but every so often lines that I remembered writing six or seven years ago would come singing through.

The whole book is narrated in the first person by Steffi and the screenwriters had kept that device, so lines that I originally wrote for my actress daughter to speak on YouTube  (http://youtu.be/UckoWyITGW8 ) are now being spoken by another young actress, all of us mere wraiths in the ever moving business of story-building and story-telling.