Don’t even think about it. It’s not on. There’s no way you will ever be able to come up with a classy limerick that starts ‘There was a young lady from Buckingham…’ There are times when those creative and humorous impulses of yours just need to be reined in. And one of the professional ghostwriter’s least understood functions is the subtle business of saving the author from himself. Or herself – males don’t have a monopoly in this area.

We work with people who are almost always excited and passionate about their ideas. They’re keen to describe their experiences, tell their quirky stories and, often, make the odd joke. I like to encourage that. But if you’re going for a laugh, it’s got to be funny, or witty, or – at the very least – unpredictable. And it’s part of our job to deliver the bad news when something just isn’t going to work.

The same applies to a lot of sentimentally valued family reminiscences and personal memories, which may, unfortunately, be far less interesting to the reader than to the writer.

One of the first business books I ever ghosted, a specialised tome on the potential of Big Data in marketing analytics, involved the drastic decision, right at the end of the project, to cut the manuscript by 22,000 words, or approximately sixty pages.

We lost some interesting tales about my author’s early adventures in entrepreneurship, but we gained a terrific focus and clarity about what his consultancy could offer marketers. When the self-published hardback was ready, it was laboriously mailed out by hand to 600 potential clients. It was effectively a promotional brochure. But it was a brochure with serious weight and heft and it had a remarkable impact, generating new business worth well over a million pounds.

Within a few months, my author was ordering another 1,000 copies, followed by another reprint a year later. And not long afterwards, this little start-up of his was bought up, lock, stock and barrel, by one of the world’s largest management consultancies.

There were several important lessons here. One was that the author and the ghostwriter must have a really trusting working relationship. Another was that they must be prepared to kill their darlings and make tough editorial calls, even changing direction and emphasis late in the day.

But the third lesson was that the payoffs from publishing a great book don’t necessarily come from mass sales. Lucrative takeovers don’t happen to everyone, but authors gain recognition or promotion, are offered speaking, TED Talk or podcasting slots, are contacted by new investors, customers and suppliers and often find the most unexpected opportunities opening up for them.

Helping the author decide what to leave out – whether it’s jokes, philosophical musings, tales of university life or grandma’s wise saws and precepts – is a key part of our role. And so is the task of making sure the reader has enough background information to understand and keep track of what’s going on.

In every subject area I’ve worked in – from management and leadership to medicine, sport and music – there are clichés that need to be avoided and other vital facts or insights that are so obvious to the practitioners that they tend to be left out. A top ghostwriter will help the author steer a course between these two dangers, making sure the final text is pitched at the right level for the target audience.

Many years ago, Truman Capote attacked Jack Kerouac and the rest of the Beat Generation authors with the waspish put-down: ‘That’s not writing; it’s typing.’ For people who don’t understand what a real ghostwriter brings to each project, that probably sounds like a fair enough summary of what we do. We interview, we listen back and we type.

But anyone who has worked with a real professional knows the truth is very different.

We push, we elicit, we cross-question. We support, console and encourage. We draw out the known and the unknown. Then we put it all into words, capturing the individual’s voice and pacing, structuring and shaping the text. And when we have a completed chapter or section or manuscript and we discuss it with the author, we may find ourselves going back to change a phrase here, a sentence there, perhaps an entire chapter, sometimes a whole theme.

That can be hard. But a good ghost is a patient ghost, and tenacity is part of the job spec. In the end, my goal is to deliver what the author would have written in his or her dreams.

And if those dreams include wordplay, jokes and limericks, that job will include helping the author exercise a fine discretion to make sure only the ones that will work get through the net and appear in print. 

 

Ian Shircore’s latest nonfiction bestseller, Conspiracy, has sold 73,000 copies and annoyed conspiracy theorists around the world