Pity my poor wife, trying to have a quiet night in with her husband, watching a bit of TV together in peace and quiet – and he’s all but screaming at the screen, “JUST WRITE THE THING!”

Specifically, we were watching Frasier; even more specifically, the episode ‘Author, Author’ in which Dr Frasier Crane and his brother Niles, who love each other dearly but will drop into pointless one-upmanship at the drop of a hat, decide to write a book together on the psychiatry of sibling relationships. (Watch the scene on YouTube here.) They rent a hotel suite, they lock themselves away… And by the time the sun comes up the next day, they have worked up a $232 bill in the minibar and are still arguing over the first line.

All good comedy contains elements of truth. How do you start your book?

Then, after the first line come all the other lines, and there can be a lot of them, leading to another common problem. Frasier and Niles are both fans of Dorothy L Sayers; I wonder if they have ever read her Gaudy Night? The immortal character of Miss Lydgate is instantly recognisable by anyone who has ever worked at the receiving end of academic publishing.

She is an Oxford academic whose endless tinkering on her monolithic History of Prosody – twelve different typefaces, labyrinthine footnotes – has become the stuff of legend. (‘She’s suddenly thought of a new appendix.’ ‘Oh no!’ cried the Dean. ‘Alas, yes!…’) When the proofs are finally delivered to the printers it is almost as much a matter of celebration for the Senior Common Room as the fact that Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey have worked out who it is that is terrorising the college. (‘I’m almost positive I heard a faint voice crying from the window about a footnote on page 97 – but I pretended not to hear.’)

There are a great number of Miss Lydgates: ever revising, ever trying to make concrete the pure vision that exists only in their heads.

How would a ghostwriter help the warring Crane brothers, and Miss Lydgate?

A good ghost does not just write. They also have a level head, born of experience, to bring into the equation. A ghost knows that text is fluid; text on a computer screen even more so. It can be rewritten. It can be polished. It does not have to be perfect straight out of the author’s mouth.

Frasier was not wrong about the need for a gripping opening line; he was just wrong about the stage of the process at which it is written. There is no one, right way to start a piece of writing, and if you don’t immediately hit on a form of words that works – well, you can always come back to it. That’s what I would tell the Cranes. You have right up until the moment before you press the ‘Send’ button and wing it off to the publisher.

Which is Miss Lydgate’s problem, or would have been if they’d had ‘Send’ buttons in her day: forcing yourself to part with your book, releasing it into the wild. A ghostwriter is an extra set of eyes and a mental filter, and reassurance is an important part of the job. Yes, this does work. Yes, you have said what you want to say. Yes, you have made your point, and now you can stop making it.

I’ve recently reached that sad but hoped-for stage of a project where the thing actually gets sent off to the publisher and my services are no longer required.

It’s a bittersweet moment, but it shows I did my job. The project excited me the moment I read the author’s proposal. I have a keen amateur’s interest in the topic and the author studied the subject at Oxford, so together we made a good team for communicating his ideas to the general public.

He provided a synopsis of each chapter, with resources for me to investigate and use to flesh the chapter out. I bounced the chapter back to him, he bounced it in revised form back to me, and together we got it right. And repeat. Then the chapters had to be put in the order that worked best. Then I had to go through the entire book from start to finish, because no chapter is an island but part of the main, and I had to make sure that the words and ideas and themes flowed through the entire book in the best possible way.

We don’t just write. We can help you start, we can help you finish, we can help you with the in-between bits and we can help you stop starting and stop finishing. It’s what we do.