Confessions of a Ghostwriter

by Andrew Crofts

  Suddenly you’re history

  Since these are my confessions, I guess I must reveal that 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.

  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 (again I was told they had decided a woman would be more suitable), I felt I had an anecdote that might at least interest, and possibly even impress, my children.

  ‘I had lunch with Twiggy last week,’ I announced casually over Sunday lunch.

  ‘Twiggy?’ my eldest daughter exclaimed, looking just as stunned as I thought appropriate for such a momentous event. ‘That’s amazing. We’re doing her at school, in history.’

  Abused children find a voice

  At the beginning of the nineties I started to receive phone calls and letters from people who wanted to write about abuses they had suffered in their childhoods. These were not people who had had the misfortune to be born in countries that were enduring brutal dictatorships, civil wars or ethnic cleansing campaigns, these were people who had been born and brought up in democratic, peacetime Britain, a country that prided itself on being civilised, with developed social welfare services.

  Their calls seemed to be cries for help and as I talked to them I became aware of just how much courage it had taken most of them to pick up the phone in the first place. These were people whose experiences did not lead them to expect to be listened to or believed but they had the courage to keep on trying to tell their stories. Many of the things they told me tore my heart out and I felt sure there would be a readership for them if I could just get them out into the bookshops.

  I wanted to find out more about their lives and I wanted to help them to tell their stories as movingly and dramatically as possible. It seemed likely that if these stories were moving me then they would move other people as well.

  When, as a teenager, I read Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell I had been particularly struck by a scene in Paris where Orwell reports meeting a man called Charlie, whom he describes as ‘a local curiosity’. Charlie tells of visiting a girl who is being kept prisoner in a cellar which had been tricked out as a bordello-style bedroom and was guarded upstairs by an old crone. Charlie told how he gave the old woman a thousand francs, which he had stolen from his drunken brother.

  ‘Voilà,’ the woman said, ‘go down into the cellar there and do what you like. I shall see nothing, hear nothing, know nothing. You are free, you understand – perfectly free.’

  Orwell reports Charlie’s experiences in the cellar as if they make Charlie an interesting and colourful character, but it struck me that it was the girl whose story was actually the most mysterious and interesting. How had she got there? Who had betrayed her? What was the rest of her life like? What was she thinking? What were her dreams? What became of her? Her story seemed more intriguing than the story of the narrator (Orwell himself), an Old Etonian playing at being a ‘plongeur’ for a while (a bit like an early version of the student gap year), before becoming a literary legend.

  The stories that I was now hearing seemed just as fascinating, coming from a dark world that was unknown to me and that I wanted to understand better. I couldn’t understand how so many people could be getting away with abusing children and I had difficulty imagining what it must feel like to be one of those children. It seemed to me that it would be a good thing to shine some bright lights into these dark corners of the human experience, so that everyone could understand more. They also seemed to me to be perfect fairy tales; good versus evil, innocent little heroes and heroines fighting back against terrible villains.

  Filled with optimism I kept listening to the stories, writing synopses and sample material and trying to persuade publishers that they should publish them. The reaction was always the same: ‘No one,’ the publishers all informed me, ‘wants to read such gruelling and depressing stories.’ Child abuse, they believed, was all too horrible to contemplate. Even amongst the most liberal of them I could detect scepticism; was it possible that such terrible things could be happening in our own country? Surely not.

  But what, I kept asking, were pantomimes like Cinderella and Snow White about if it wasn’t child abuse? And what about Dickens’s tales from the workhouses and back streets of Victorian England? Do we really believe that the Artful Dodger and his pals were required to do nothing worse than steal a few pocket handkerchiefs and watches on behalf of their violent, thieving, drunken masters? Even the orphaned Harry Potter starts out abused by the aunt and uncle charged with his guardianship.

  I truly couldn’t understand how the same publisher could produce so many books about war, genocide and murder, creating bestsellers by glamorising, stylising and fetishising serial killers and rapists, mafia bosses and military leaders, and at the same time think that genuine, original stories by children who had been victimised were somehow too tasteless to be told.

  Then in 1993 Dave Pelzer self-published his memoir, A Child Called It, in America, and it became a word-of-mouth bestseller, filtering up into my consciousness via my children and their friends, who were passing it around in the school playground, much to the consternation of some of their parents and teachers.

  A few years later I received email from a man who wanted to write something similar about his own childhood with a violent and abusive mother. I warned him that my experience told me I might not be able to sell the book to publishers. He said that he was willing to take the risk and wanted to commission me to write the book anyway.

  It was a good story. Once it was completed I sent it to Barbara Levy, an exceptionally discreet and gentle agent, who I knew would be sympathetic when it came time to break the bad news to the author that it was unsaleable. I had reckoned without the ‘Pelzer-factor’.

  Within a week Barbara had three publishers making offers and the book went for a six figure advance. It then sat at the top of the bestseller lists for weeks and eventually went on to be made into a movie. The game had changed entirely. Other publishers saw this success and remembered that I had been in to see them in the past. They started ringing to find out if I still had any other stories that could be packaged in a similar way. On one memorable day editors from three different publishing houses, all having just come from editorial planning meetings, rang within a few hours of one another with the same request. I had plenty of stories ready and waiting, all I had to do was introduce the people with the stories to the people who now really wanted the stories, and then write them.

  The demand seemed insatiable. Supermarkets started to stock the resulting titles in massive quantities and kept asking the publishers for more. I was in a publisher’s office introducing one of these clients when another publisher, whom we had been to see earlier in the day, rang my mobile. I excused myself and slipped out of the room to take the call.

  ‘If you leave that building now,’ the other publisher said, ‘I will give you quarter of a million pounds.’

  I felt like Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire. The client and I then spent a surreal afternoon taking calls from the two publishers, finally clinching the deal before putting her back on her train home. Three months later exactly the same thing happened with another client’s story of abuse. (I will be explaining later in the ‘filthy lucre’ chapter how sums like this will soon be whittled away by reality to become far less dramatic figures, but these occasional episodes of ap
parent largesse on the part of publishers do at least provide temporary doses of adrenaline and optimism to any writer’s life.)

  Books that I wouldn’t have been able to interest anyone in a few months before were now the objects of ferocious bidding wars between the publishers with the biggest cheque books. I ended up writing about a dozen of them, selling some in conjunction with agents such as Barbara Levy and Judith Chilcote and some under my own steam. For a while they virtually all became bestsellers. There was one week when there were actually three of them in the Sunday Times charts at the same time. In some cases I was contracted to remain anonymous, but several of them graciously put my name on the flyleaf, such as The Little Prisoner by Jane Elliott, Just a Boy by Richard McCann, Daddy’s Little Earner by Maria Landon, Cry Silent Tears by Joe Peters and Please, Daddy, No by Stuart Howarth.

  So, who was reading these books that the publishers had been so sure would be too terrible for anyone to bear? Initially there was the ‘tourist trade’; people who, like me, could not imagine what it must be like to live in such a world and wanted to understand it better. Then there were the actual citizens of this ‘hidden’ world; the children who had suffered or witnessed abuse and were wanting the comfort of knowing that they were not alone. There is no way of ever quantifying how many people suffer some sort of bullying or abuse in their childhood which leaves them scarred in some way, but let’s take a guess that it is around 10 per cent of the population. That includes those abused in the home, in care, or by authority figures like priests or school teachers. That is 6 million people in the UK alone.

  Then there are those who simply want to read scary, tear-jerking tales about little heroes and heroines overcoming monsters; the same people who want to see Cinderella go to the ball and Oliver Twist escape from the clutches of Fagin and Bill Sykes.

  People who had been keeping their own stories of abuse secret due to a mixture of fear and shame, suddenly saw that it was all right to speak out. The stories I was being brought grew more and more extreme and horrific. No one was going to be able to pretend that child abuse was not a problem in society any longer. The misery memoir phenomenon became a bubble, with all the big publishers rushing onto the shelves with look-alike products. Within a few years the market was saturated and books that would previously have been given advances of hundreds of thousands of pounds were having trouble finding publishers once more.

  The genie, however, was now out of the bottle and it wasn’t long before abusers and bullies were being named and shamed in any number of previously inviolable institutions from schools to churches, orphanages to mental hospitals and even the BBC, to a point where it started to look to some like a witch hunt.

  Some time later I heard a highly distinguished publisher on a podium being asked by a member of the audience what he thought of the ‘misery memoir’ genre. He was not one of those who had joined in the gold rush and I assumed that he was going to say something dismissive.

  ‘I think they changed the art of autobiography for ever,’ he said. ‘They forced authors to be much more open and revelatory. It is no longer good enough to tell anecdotes about the day you “met Prince Philip” or “danced with Sammy Davis Junior”; if you want to capture the hearts of readers you have to open up your emotional life as well and talk honestly and from the heart. I think they did the genre a great service.’

  Sacked by a glove puppet

  Everyone around the boardroom table was entirely in agreement; at no stage and no time was anyone allowed to admit out loud or in writing that our celebrity was not a real person. Never mind that the celebrity in question was made of felt, this was the merchandising business, there had to be rules. The lawyers insisted.

  My job, as the chosen ghostwriter, was to produce an autobiography which would fill in this celebrity’s back story, his early life before he found fame, and exactly what happened to him in the ‘wilderness years’ before his comeback as a potentially money-making merchandising vehicle. There were many careers resting on the outcome of this exercise, most of them sitting round that table in their shirtsleeves – brainstorming and sipping mineral water.

  I had been hired by the distinguished publisher who had agreed to bring the eventual book out under his distinguished imprint. It was a nice job for both of us. For me it felt a bit like being given a licence to write fiction (although, of course, it wasn’t fiction because the lawyers said so and the story must, therefore, be spoken of at all times as non-fiction, even though I was going to be making it up).

  One of the golden rules of writing both fiction and non-fiction must be to be fundamentally truthful in your writing, and if you aren’t going to be truthful then you’d better be as entertaining as hell. But, of course, truthful was the option to go for here, because the lawyers said so.

  Our hero had found fame in the seventies and we all know how badly celebrities were allowed to behave in those days. Now, it seemed to me, was the time for him to ’fess up to every little indiscretion (this was before the really heinous and unamusing revelations of the period started to emerge). I was also sure readers would understand exactly why he went off the rails during the wilderness years – wouldn’t everyone if subjected to the pressures of sudden fame and fortune? To hold on to the readers’ sympathies I felt we must come clean about the addictions and the dodgy business deals that he had become involved in during those years at the same time as dropping the names of all the celebrities he had mingled with.

  Once the manuscript was finished and both the distinguished publisher and I were happy that we had done full justice to the whole Greek tragedy of this celebrity’s rise and fall and resurrection, there was another meeting in the same boardroom. We arrived, feeling extremely pleased with ourselves, but now the men and women in shirtsleeves were no longer smiling. The celebrity, apparently, was not happy with the way he had come across. The ghost was going to have to be replaced by someone who understood what was expected of them.

  ‘The thing we have to remember,’ the distinguished publisher sighed as we stood on the street outside, forlornly scouring the horizon for a taxi to whisk us away from the scene of our humiliation, ‘is that nobody around that table has ever commissioned anything bigger than a fridge magnet.’

  I felt better for his wise words.

  A debt to Dale Carnegie

  ‘You’re like a human Hoover,’ my wife complained as we drove home from the dinner party. ‘That poor woman …’

  ‘What poor woman?’ I truly didn’t know what she was talking about. I had been basking in the afterglow of what I thought had been a pleasant evening out.

  ‘The one you were cross-examining about her love life.’

  ‘I wasn’t cross-examining her,’ I protested, ‘I just pressed the button and everything poured out. She was a human Nespresso machine.’

  ‘You do it all the time. You’re like the Spanish Inquisition. Some people like to preserve a little privacy, you know.’

  She was right, of course, I do it all the time, but in my experience most people love talking about themselves, and those who don’t pretty quickly clam up or tell me to mind my own business. It was a secret I learned at the age of 17 when I was heading for London in search of streets paved with gold with virtually no social skills at all.

  How, I wondered as I watched those around me socialising with apparent ease, did people find things to talk about to strangers at parties? How did you find things to say to young women on first dates? (Bearing in mind that my early romantic education had come from the regency novels of my mother’s Georgette Heyer collection, since when I had been incarcerated in single- sex boarding schools.) The adult world seemed a daunting, if exciting, place and I was desperate to discover the secret of all the grown-ups who seemed so self-confident in every social situation.

  In my search for a magic formula I came across How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. The book had been written in 1936, so was already more than 30 years old and more than 40 years later I c
an still remember the key message. Mr Carnegie explained that virtually everyone loves to talk about themselves and about their pet subjects. If you keep asking them questions they will keep answering them and the more they talk the more material you have for follow-up questions. The vast majority of people will come away from the conversation thinking you are the most charming and interesting person in the world, even if they have not asked you a single question about yourself (and it is my experience that a shocking number of people will fall silent the moment you stop asking the questions, even at private dinner tables where you would assume they wanted to be polite).

  For a self-conscious teenager setting out to enter the adult world this one piece of advice was priceless; for someone wanting to make a living as an author and ghostwriter it has proved invaluable.

  Over the years it has become such an ingrained habit that there is more than a little truth in my wife’s fear that the technique can be intimidating for those who might be unused to talking about themselves. Of course, it should be applied with some sensitivity, but at the same time there are so many questions which are so fascinating they are irresistible, even if they are considered impertinent: how much do you earn? Why did you divorce your husband? Are you having an affair with that man over there? Why do you suppose your children hate you? … It’s amazing how many people reward straight questions with extremely full and revealing answers.

  The first questions a ghostwriter should ask

  The first questions you ask in any relationship are always the hardest. The answers you receive are going to become the signposts for the journey the conversation is going to take from then on.

  I receive three or four enquiries a day from people who want to write books, mostly via email in recent years. The first things I ask for are a brief synopsis of the story (the sort of thing we might eventually see on the back cover), and some explanation of what their expectations are for the book. Are they hoping for a bestseller, for instance, or do they want to self-publish a few copies for friends and family?