• Collected
• Article

The Invisibility of the Ghostwriter

‘How did you get into ghostwriting?’ people ask. It’s a good question, because there isn’t, as far as I know, a school for ghosts. Not yet, at any rate. I think most ghosts fall into it by accident. They’re journalists who specialise in long celebrity interviews, and then, one day, that interview just gets a little bit longer.

I remember how I got into it. I was writing travel books, selling OK, but barely scraping a living, even with additional journalism. My agent took me out for supper. ‘Wouldn’t you like to make a bit more money?’ he asked. As I eagerly muttered ‘yes’, little did I realise the terrible contract I was entering. Before I knew it, he had provided me with a subject; that’s the ghostwriter’s term for the famous or extraordinary person who wants their story told, and I was sitting in a flat in Central London, listening, asking questions, and checking that the tape recorder was still going round. That shows how long ago it was.

My first subject was in fact two subjects, a couple, Jack and Zena we called them; she, a young Muslim woman from the same northern suburbs of Leeds that later produced the 7/7 bombers; and he the somewhat dodgy older white guy she’d decided to elope with to avoid a forced marriage. They’d had a terrible time, on the run from her murderous family, misunderstood by police and social services, and their story just poured out of them. There were no problems with material. And I quickly learnt to let them keep talking and only interrupt judiciously. And that’s one of the key techniques, I think, because as a ghost you’re not just typing up an interview, you are using that interview as the basis for creating the book they would have written, were they able to write. So in addition to getting the basic narrative, you’ve also got to get the detail that you need to bring the story alive on the page. The ‘show not tell’ stuff that creative writing tutors bang on about. What did that street in Leeds look like? In high summer, as you were getting to know each other? What was the weather like, Zena, on the morning you ran away from home? Tell me a little bit more about your bedroom.

And with these subsidiary questions, artfully inserted, you sometimes get material that can be used to dramatize, say, the conflict at the heart of the tale. In this case, Zena’s room contained a framed photo of her beloved father with her and her sisters, a pile of the traditional clothes – the dupatta and salwar kameez – that she would no longer be needing, a stack of the Western CDs – Madonna, Queen, Michael Jackson – that her father had allowed her to dance around to in her early teenaged years: the cultural contradiction in objects.

When you have the long transcript of the interview in front of you and you’re starting to actually write the narrative, you will still find, however thorough your questions have been, big holes in this necessary information. You can end up making a lot of subsidiary phone calls or sending a blizzard of emails to your subject. Here are some I sent a later client, the TV explorer Bruce Parry, about an adventure in Mongolia:

When people arrived in the night, was there a sound of trucks, or did Batbaya’s friends arrive on horseback? Did Batbaya ride or drive off? Did Mishig go with him? What was on the TV in the yurt — in terms of programmes?

And so on, and so on. Detail, detail, detail, to flesh out the picture. Sometimes one simple question can give you so much. It turned out that on the TV in that Mongolian yurt there were, besides the Government-sponsored propaganda that passed for news bulletins, programmes of dancing and judo competitions, appallingly dubbed prehistoric Hollywood B movies; and countless shampoo commercials. So there’s a scene I would never have imagined.

Sometimes your subject, your client, will be wary of detail — it’s not something they want to remember. I had this problem with one of the soldiers I wrote for in the book Walking With the Wounded. Guy was a young cavalry captain who’d been wounded in battle in Afghanistan. But when I asked him to talk me through the moment he’d lost his lower leg, when the armoured vehicle he was commanding was hit by a Taliban RPG, his reply was, ‘Well, I looked down, and I thought: Bugger it, I’ve lost my foot’. It took a good few more questions, and a certain amount of mutual trust-building, to discover that there was also a lot of nasty grey smoke in the picture, a putrid stink of burning flesh, and his second-in-command sitting dead beside him. That what he saw was his foot attached to his leg by a sinew. That all the bone was gone, and it looked – his image – like the remains of a boot hanging by its laces. And as quite often, once you get past the mental obstacles to writing, you find your subject has noticed all the detail that a writer needs after all.

Then again, sometimes your subject can’t remember the detail and you have to do the research yourself. Thank God for the Internet, so you can see exactly what the bar in that hotel in Nairobi looked like, and realise that your subject could never have looked down from his room and seen that woman in the pool, as he remembered, as there were palm trees in the way.

So what do you do if all else fails? And here I’m repeating the advice given to me by my then agent, who had many ghosts on his books. ‘Make it up’, he told me, with a smile. Judiciously, obviously. And in my experience, it’s often the made-up bits that the subject likes the best. A bee buzzing around a guitar at the Live Aid festival. A monkey leaping around in the tree above the jungle encampment.

To return to that bedroom where Zena was trying to decide whether to stay or go on that fateful night. The house was on a main road in Leeds. And I remembered myself living on a main road as a child, and the lights of the passing cars playing on the ceiling. So I added in that detail, and was rewarded, after the book came out, by hearing Zena telling Jenni Murray, on Woman’s Hour, about how she’d lain there, that fateful evening, watching the lights from the passing cars playing on the ceiling. Well, maybe she had. But I did have a little private chuckle.

Of course, not all subjects are as eager to tell their tale as Jack and Zena were. At the other end of the scale I had Robbie Williams, who really didn’t want to do his book at all. The managers who’d employed me, had, I think, had an inkling that he might not be that easy to work with, so they suggested that I went on tour with him, around Europe. The idea was, I think, that in the morning or afternoon, on the bus, heading between venues, or at the gig, in the quiet doldrums before the show, Rob would be bored enough to want to talk. This didn’t quite happen. And even as my agent kept phoning to tell me, in a breathless voice, how much money the book was now selling for – four hundred, six hundred, eight-hundred thousand – I was signally failing to get the material I needed. Stockholm, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Berlin, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Bielefeld… On, round Europe, we went and I still wasn’t getting it; the story, or the detail. Back in London, knowing that my quarter-share of the advance was only mine if I delivered on time, and that was six weeks away, I piled on the pressure. I hung around Rob’s flat in Notting Hill. With the managers’ blessing I flew to Paris with him on the private jet for a gig. Up to Manchester, bouncing through the sky, for an interview with Mark and Lard. Still nothing; or if not nothing, not very much.  Finally, he cracked. One warm June evening, a week or two before my deadline, he took pity on me, ‘the journalist’, as he called me. Or perhaps it was just that, earlier that evening, in the café on Fulham Road that he liked, I’d revealed some vulnerability of my own. In an hour and a half, sitting in the dusk in the garden of the house in Chelsea Old Church St that he was borrowing from his friend Roger Taylor of Queen, he gave me all I needed. I remember phoning the editor afterwards from the car. ‘Unless something’s badly wrong with the tape’, I said, ‘I’ve got a book for you’.

Bruce Parry offered another kind of problem. Punctilious, as ex-soldiers generally are, charming, warm, chatty, he filled up my tape with the material I needed. But then I made a mistake. Not sure that the dialogue I’d come up with was quite as spot-on as I wanted it to be, I showed him how to use Word’s useful feature Track Changes and suggested that he could add things to the narrative, or change it, if it didn’t ring quite true. I was hoping for some authentic Army slang, that sort of thing. But no. He left my slightly tin-eared dialogue alone. And instead inserted long tracts that I really didn’t need: about global warming, or FGM, or depopulation. He was – is – a persistent and very focussed guy. Getting him to take out these wild digressions, or at least reduce them to vaguely fit the narrative, involved a week at his house in Ibiza, when he nearly killed me crashing his 4×4 into a wall. I hope not deliberately.

Interview done, transcript typed (not by you, if you can help it), draft written — what could possibly go wrong now? Well, everything, in fact. The publisher may love it, but the client may not. This is tricky stuff. You are telling their story, hopefully revealing intimate details about them that have never yet been revealed. You are getting as close to their ego as is humanly possible, and the egos of these kind of big achievers are generally not small. Beware.

One client I had – shall we call him Nathan – was a kind of eco-activist who had spent thirteen years of his life travelling around the world under what he called ‘human power’, crossing the oceans on a pedalo and the continents, variously, on a bicycle and rollerblades. Each chapter of this real-life epic saga was a book in itself. There was one bit where he got stuck, for seven weeks, alone, in a revolving current in the Sargasso Sea; during which time he split into four distinct personalities who would argue with each other: there was a Nazi, I remember that; and an IRA man; and two others. There was, basically, far too much material. As I looked at the thirty-eight C-90s that we’d recorded during our ten days closeted together I thought: How on earth am I going to crunch this down into 80,000 gripping words? In sixteen weeks? With a crying baby in the bedroom and roadworks on the street outside?

As it happened, one problem was replaced with another. Having drafted the first twelve chapters, I sent them over to Nathan at the same time as the publisher. The publisher loved it. Just what they wanted. Crack on with speed! But Nathan had problems. He never really explained to me exactly what they were, but the narrative wasn’t quite as he’d hoped. He also lived in California, so communication was difficult, especially as he rarely picked up his emails — or at least my emails. He wanted some more about moksha, that was one thing. Then he’d shown the chapters to a writer friend who thought they could do better — beware of those people. Then he stopped communicating at all. Not a single call or email came from him. Ever. To this day. Explaining what was wrong. Not for the last time, a project that I had worked hard on was dropped. At least the agent had drawn up a decent contract and I got paid.

This kind of fiasco happens more often than you’d think. A very famous name who owns – among many other things – an airline showed the manuscript of his memoir to his neighbour in First Class. The neighbour fell asleep reading it. Mayhem! The whole thing had to be redrafted. Then there was Sean Connery, who was signed to Penguin for over a million. A celebratory party was held. Then Connery must have realised the kind of revelations that are required to make a book and he didn’t want to go on with it. Fair enough. Just make sure that you are contracted to get paid, whatever happens.

But hopefully all goes well. The subject’s worries are addressed. Problems are ironed out. With endless follow-up questions, the narrative slowly thickens, like soup. All parties are happy, or happy enough. Maybe the subject doesn’t even care, as in the case of Robbie, who gave me no problems at all with the manuscript I finally produced. And when, later, The Independent asked him what he thought of his number one bestseller he said, ‘I haven’t read it. It’s full of words’.

The book is published. And here’s a plus — as a ghost you don’t have to be involved with any tedious promotional activities. They probably won’t even invite you to the launch party. As my then agent once said, ‘The clue is in the word, Mark. Ghost. You’re supposed to be invisible’.

Image shows Mark McCrum with Bruce Parry. Supplied by the author.

You might also like: