“We won’t make a drama out of a crisis.”

Nine little words. Put them in the right order and what have you got? In this case, eye-watering returns for Commercial Union plc and its shareholders. Goodness knows how much money one talented copywriter made that particular insurance company. Considering this 1980s strapline is still bouncing around my brain in 2025, I’d suggest a seriously large amount.

As a ghostwriter my job is to change the message dramatically. Ghostwriters do need to make a drama out of a crisis. Because if there’s no drama, people won’t read the book.

And the drama is there. Dramatic events are regularly presented to us on a plate. Take a client I had a few years back. He was flying his helicopter around the sky – as you do, if you buy companies for fun and make an enormous amount of money at an extremely young age – when he suddenly found he had company. A police helicopter drew up alongside him and the sign language was quite clear. They wanted him to land immediately.

Which he did, though he had no idea why he was being told to do so.

Nor did he understand why, once parked on his helipad at his extensive mansion, he was tasered, handcuffed and driven to the nearest police station where he spent the night. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that’s a cracking story with which to start a book.

It’s when the drama isn’t quite so obvious that ghostwriters earn our corn. From the moment we meet a client and start to hear their story, our antennae are twitching. Where’s the compelling thread? Who are the strong characters? What’s the way in? (Not every story begins with an unexplained arrest.) It doesn’t matter if we are being hired to write a memoir, a biography, fiction or non-fiction, the drama of a given situation is where the gold lies.

But often the drama is buried deep. The client may be oblivious to it. Writers take imagination for granted because we’ve been granted so much of it. That’s how we make a living out of writing. But it gradually dawns on us that we – along with creatives in other fields – are in a tiny minority.

Which sometimes means digging away until you do strike gold.

Getting inside the drama is what makes writers tick. I have recently taken up screenwriting. Here the drama must be distilled to its purest essence. There can be nothing extraneous. Every line of dialogue has its job to do. It’s a bit like being a ghostwriter: you are putting words into your characters’ mouths. How you know what they would say is a bit of a mystery, but you do.

Harold Pinter was once asked by a puzzled actor what one of his lines meant. “How the hell should I know? I only wrote it!” came the rather unhelpful reply.

Let us just call it instinct. Instinct and inspiration. Writers need to have an instinct for drama, and ghostwriters for rooting out drama where it’s not instantly evident. If they haven’t got that they might be better off in another field. How about insurance?