Authors Electric

  It’s been an interesting month to be a ghostwriter. The weekend before Prince Harry’s book was officially published, as the leaks and “exclusive” interviews piled up on both sides of the Atlantic, the media suddenly became interested in the idea of who actually did the writing and how the whole relationship with the subject works.   I had been looking forward to reading the book from the moment I heard that J.R. Moehringer was going to be writing it, already being an admirer of his previous work, particularly the ghosting job he did for Andre Agassi. But the eventual book that he and Harry produced surpassed all expectations, providing a brilliant example of just how well a ghostwriting partnership can work if the story is strong, the subject is wanting to be open and honest, and the writer is skillful . On the day Spare came out it broke all records for sales of non-fiction, shifting something like 1.4 million copies in English alone, not to mention the sixteen other l...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. The Hayes, Swanwick - photo taken by me, Allison Symes I was at the Swanwick Writers’ Summer School in August, my annual residential writing week at The Hayes, Swanwick, Derbyshire. As well as learning a great deal, I catch up with friends I only see in person here. We stay in contact via social media otherwise. A lovely time is had by all. The Hayes, Swanwick, Derbyshire   I deliberately go to courses that are “left field” to my flash fiction and blogging. I learn more than I think I will from these and did so again here.   I went to the four part specialist course of Creative Non-Fiction by Simon Whaley. I found it enlightening as some of my blogs hover on this category of writing. (If you can go to his course, I highly recommend it. You will learn so much about observation and conveying the truth).   Creative non-fiction is factual work told using fictional techniques. Facts cannot be changed but i...

  What a strange and interesting world we in the media have created for ourselves, as we pick up characters and stories, some real, some fictional, and then exaggerate and distort them in order to hold the interest of our readers and viewers - or sometimes perhaps to amuse ourselves. One upon a time it was Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, then Princess Diana, Katie Price, the Beckhams, O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, the Kardashians and all the others who took their turns in the media mincing machine, sometimes as heroes, sometimes as villains. At the moment, it is Harry and Meghan who have had their pretty interesting personal story twisted, inflated and turned into an intellectual property which will, no doubt, generate billions of dollars for the global media barons, before it has been sucked dry of all possible new angles, and the public has grown tired of them. (Some of us are old enough to remember a time when both Prince Charles and Prince Andrew were depicted in the media ...

It has been an interesting month of contrasts. In London I have been attending meetings with the fast-expanding marketing team being recruited to launch the novel I have ghosted about a man called Joe, who just might be able to solve every one of the world’s current problems. It is now due for publication in the Netherlands next June and in the UK next September. The writing is 99.9% done and so I was able to enjoy the meetings knowing my responsibilities were almost fully discharged. The nucleus of the party met and stayed at “The Rookery” in Clerkenwell, a wonderful hotel which is a sister to the eccentric Hazlitt’s in Soho and feels like a rather grand country house despite being in the middle of a very buzzy bit of  London . Highly recommended and a million miles from the other story I was researching this month in  Africa . The subject of the latter book walked out of South Sudan in search of an education when he was a young boy. He had no mon...

When you work alone most of the time, and when you need the outside world to buy your products or bring you interesting commissions, you have to depend on some sort of communications lifeline. The question is; when does “dependency” tip into “addiction”? It used to be the post. Every day I would be waiting eagerly for a precious letter of acceptance from a publisher, or an enquiry letter or – most crucially – a cheque. Most days there was that inevitable moment of disappointment when the postman was walking away leaving nothing of interest on the doormat or, far worse, a manuscript thumped in with a rejection letter. Then I got a telephone line of my own and that became my lifeline. I hardly dared move out of earshot of its ring, (phones were still tethered to the wall). I dreamed of the day when someone would invent a cordless phone so I could at least go out into the garden while waiting for the wonderful calls that came so sporadically. Before someone got round to ...

  I have just read First Person,  Richard Flanagan's new novel about a hungry young novelist struggling with ghostwriting the life of an impossible con-man for a demanding publisher. It captures exactly the sort of despair we have all faced at times when trying to make a living in the creative world. I think perhaps texts such as this should be recommended reading on any vocational creative writing course and in every art school, (and every drama school come to that), in order to test the mettle of the would-be creatives. I remember as a teenager reading Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell and Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham and being both excited and appalled. Excited by the prospect of escaping an ordinary life in order to be a great poet/artist like the heroes of these books, and simultaneously appalled by the poverty and rejection that they have to face as a result of their choices.   If you can read books like these and st...

Writing books is one of the most enjoyable and rewarding ways to earn a living and I can’t imagine ever doing anything else. That does not mean, however, that every part of the operation is a joy. As with any large scale endeavour, from creating a garden to running a marathon, from being a rock star to being a prince of the realm, there are times where the effort and the monotony of the job feel crushing. The blues usually strike me about half way through the writing process. All too often, I believe, the books which the market has traditionally demanded are longer than their subject matter merits. If you write tightly and edit well as you go along you can often tell a story very effectively in thirty to fifty thousand words. (“The Turn of the Screw”, “Animal Farm”, “Of Mice and Men”, “The Great Gatsby”, “Death in Venice”, “Heart of Darkness”, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” … I could go on). Publishers and readers, however, have been accustomed for many years to books that are eig...

A few weeks ago I went down to the beautiful hills on the Rwanda/Congo border, fancying that I was following in the great literary footsteps of the likes of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, but in reality probably more closely resembling William Boot from Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop . I was travelling with my client, Hyppolite, a young man who was just seven years old when he survived genocide. In 100 days he lost eighty members of his extended family and witnessed his beloved father being hacked to death by machetes and eaten by dogs. Born in a mud hut without shoes, water or power, and often hungry, he struggled after the genocide to gain an education and to learn to forgive the killers. By the age of thirty he had a Masters Degree in Sociology from Bristol University , had started a Foundation for Peace and had delivered a lecture at Harvard. I am hoping that in this book we will be able to give a child’s view of genocide, in the style of The Diary of a Young Girl...

I have just read the best book on the writing life since William Goldman’s “Adventures in the Screentrade”, which is now more than 30 years old, so this is praise indeed. The book in question is called “Pretend I’m Not Here” by Barbara Feinman Todd, who started as a journalist on the Washington Post and became a ghostwriter for Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, (as in Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in “All the President’s Men”) and for Ben Bradlee, their editor, (played in the film by Jason Robards).  She then went on to ghost for Hillary Clinton, while she was First Lady, and gives a riveting insight into life in the Clinton White House, and the back-stabbing world of Washington politics and journalism .  In the process she sheds considerable light on how Mrs Clinton came to lose the affection and respect of the American people so dramatically. The book perfectly captures the mechanics of what it is to be a ghostwriter to the very rich, the ver...

I first published a version of this article in the Guardian on-line, so please forgive me if parts of it sound familiar.  I left school with a burning urge to lead the life of a writer; travelling like Byron, fêted like Wilde before his fall, creating laughter like Wodehouse and crafting sentences like Nabokov. I had no professional contacts so I wrote my masterpieces speculatively and every path I went down ended with a rejection slip or total silence. The perceived wisdom then, as now, was that earning a living as a writer was about as likely as winning a lottery. Then I discovered the secret of marketing. Instead of writing things and trying to persuade people to buy them, I would find out what writing services people needed and offer to provide them. So, at the same time as begging publishers and editors for commissions, I made myself available to anyone who might want to write an article or a book but did not feel able to do it for themselves. I have ju...

I confess I was more than a little in love with Twiggy when I was a schoolboy in the Sixties. Although she was about four years older than me she did not seem as intimidatingly mature and grown up as the other models and film stars that my generation of boys were busily lusting after. In fact she didn’t look that different to some of us when we were made-up to appear on stage in school plays. It was quite possible to imagine yourself on a date with her, despite her extraordinary and unusual beauty – not to mention her enormous global fame and iconic status. Twiggy So, when a publisher rang in the mid nineties and asked if I would come to the office for lunch with Twiggy as she was looking for a ghostwriter, it set all my nostalgia glands tingling. The lunch was delightful. Twiggy was delightful, and even though I didn’t get the job, (as sometimes happens, I was told they had decided a woman would be more suitable), I felt I had an anecdote that might at lea...

“You must fly down for the launch of the book,” the Minister boomed, “I insist. The President will be there. It will be a great day. There will be food and speeches. I will make all the arrangements for you.” There was no arguing with him, and I didn’t really want to anyway. Most clients don’t even admit that they’ve used a ghostwriter; they certainly don’t want to invite him or her half way across the world to the launch party. In most cases they don’t even let the ghost know that there is going to be a party. Once the book is written and delivered the ghost normally slinks back into the shadows and moves on to the next project, allowing the client to bask in the glory of being a published author. The Minister, however, was a man who enjoyed the limelight so much he wanted to share it with the whole world, which was one of the reasons he was such an endearing man. His extremely efficient assistant made the arrangements through the embassy in London and a busines...

“She said what?” my wife’s tone of voice managed to convey both her contempt for the woman I was describing and her astonishment at my naiveté for swallowing her line. Her fork had come to a halt half way to her mouth as she peered down the table at me, obviously awaiting some sort of satisfactory response. As so often happens I had been talking without fully engaging my brain, expounding my client’s theories on why she was performing a social service by sleeping with other people’s husbands. My wife’s tone had woken me fully and I sensed danger. I paused and struggled to replay whatever I had just said in my head. The words, which just an hour or two before I had been typing out with fluent conviction, suddenly had a rather hollow ring to them. I cleared my throat and tried putting my client’s point of view a little differently. My wife listened like a High Court judge might listen to a lawyer pleading for a client with a hopeless case, but her expression did not lighte...

Living, as I do, in one of the safest and most prosperous islands in the world, and being part of a comfortable and loving family, it is easy to forget or to remain ignorant of the depths of hellishness that man is capable of inflicting on his fellow man, and frequently does. The collapse of the communist Eastern Bloc at the end of the eighties released a hurricane of shocking and fascinating human interest stories, carried back to the West by people who needed the help of ghostwriters to tell them. When Romanian President, Nicolae Ceausescu, was toppled from power and executed in 1989 his country was released from a quarter of a century of oppression. What horrified the outside world the most, however, was what was discovered inside the walls of the “orphanages for the irrecuperable” which littered the country. Thousands of children who had been deemed to be of no use to Romania, or who had been “inconvenient” births, were found locked up in these asylums, tied up in co...

Fifteen years ago I was ghostwriting books for the most disenfranchised members of the global community; victims of enforced marriages, sex workers, orphans, victims of crimes, bonded labourers and abused children. Out of those experiences I wrote a novel, initially entitled “Maisie’s Amazing Maids”.  The book did okay but then slipped onto the back shelves and from there into the obscurity that envelops all but the lucky few in the book world. In the past that would have been the end of the story, but now, of course, there are a number of options for breathing life back into books that are no longer in the first flush of publication. The book has now been re-launched by Thistle Publishing as a sumptuous paperback and e-book entitled “Pretty Little Packages”. Thistle is an enormously successful imprint set up by London agents Andrew Lownie and David Haviland to keep books alive and available when the more traditional publishing organisations are no long...

“So, when are you going to write your own memoir?” people ask whenever I tell stories from my many, many years of ghostwriting. “Never,” I have always assured them. “I can’t because of all the confidentiality agreements I have signed, all the relationships of trust I have built up with clients over the years.” Well, now I have done it. Not every story can be told, of course, but for those that can, names have been changed, stories and locations mixed and matched, permissions sought and surprisingly readily given. In the days when I started ghosting, around thirty years ago, secrecy was everything. No one ever admitted they used ghostwriters, no ghostwriters were ever credited or talked about in polite publishing circles. That seems to have changed and most people now get the fact that books need to be written by professionals, edited by professionals and published by professionals. So on August 14th, “Confessions of a Ghostwriter” will be coming out from Friday Pro...

Their enquiry stood out from the others that came through that day. James emailed that he and his girlfriend, Penny, lived in Switzerland and were looking for a ghostwriter to tell their love story. He warned that it would contain sexual elements that many would find shocking, but that there would be many lessons to be learnt from it. Dear Mr. Crofts, if possible, I think that meeting up with us, seeing who we are, hearing us out, would not be a waste of time. He told me they would be in London the following weekend and would be staying at the Dorchester in Park Lane . Curiosity got the better of me. “Fifty Shades of Grey” was selling millions of copies a week and female sexuality was the hot topic of the day. Since I was going to be in Mayfair anyway, interviewing an African leader whose memoir I was just finishing off, I suggested I pop into the Dorchester once I was finished. The African leader had a busier schedule than expected and finding myself free in the midd...