The ‘hit’ and rush of optimism comes from the hope that something diverting is approaching, something intriguing and different, an experience that will open my eyes to something I didn’t know before.
More often than not, of course, a ringing phone merely yields up a domestic crisis or a sales call from some other person desperately searching the ether for someone who will be interested in whatever they have to sell, and there is a momentary spasm of disappointment as I realise this call isn’t going to provide any sort of high. Most emails will be spam or mundane or will quickly lead to a dead end, but the 24-hour, 7-day world that we now live in means that a golden nugget could appear from the mud at any time of the night or day. That is what makes it so tempting to check the emails at regular intervals, and to spring to answer the phone when it rings. Someone in LA could just be sitting down at their computer to type a note to me as I head up to bed; someone in Hong Kong could be ringing before dawn has even made it through my eyelids.
It is an addiction which provides a hit as pure and sweet as any narcotic. It numbs the reality of daily life just as effectively as alcohol, passes the time just as effectively as lighting another cigarette.
The next rush comes when I follow up the enquiry and my brain receives what feels like an impossibly heavy overload of unfamiliar information. I can’t believe that I will ever be able to unravel it, give it shape and turn it into something digestible for readers, sharing my excitement of discovery with them. The adrenaline is made to flow. As the weeks and months go by, however, the fog of confusion begins to clear and I start to understand the subject. Finally I am ready to write, drifting gently back down to reality once more, and soon I am desperate for another hit from a new possibility for an adventure, either physical or mental.
Evangelists of technology
Can you remember the first time someone described the internet to you?
I guess you would have to have been born before 1980 to have had such a mind-blowing moment. Anyone younger would have imbibed the concept while suckling at their mother’s breast, or soaked it up in the school classroom or playground. If, however, you were born before cyberspace was a generally understood concept there is almost bound to have been a memorable instant of revelation.
I had that ‘road to Damascus’ moment at a writers’ group where an evangelist from the then weird world of information technology came to explain to us what the world wide web was and how it was going to change our lives. I was still at the stage of being by far the youngest in any room filled with professional writers but even so I found it hard to grasp the full potential of what was being described to us. I’d only just got the hang of inserting floppy disks.
Every bit of information in the world would soon be available on my computer screen at the click of a button? Surely this was the stuff of wild science fantasy?
When I got home that night and my wife asked what the talk had been about I completely failed to convey any of the sense of mystery and excitement that the evangelist had managed to pump into the back room of the pub I’d been in a few hours earlier. I just couldn’t get my head around the concept sufficiently to answer any of her incredulous questions.
‘Perhaps,’ I thought as I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to imagine how I would ever be able to master something so potentially immense, ‘it will go away and I can just continue to bumble along with my Amstrad word processor, my fax machine and our revolutionary new cordless house phone.’
‘Mr Harris would like to quote you …’
Once your book has been given life and sailed out into the world to seek its fortune (and hopefully yours), there is no way of knowing whose hands it will end up in. Just occasionally, however, a bit of feedback arrives which takes you completely by surprise.
An email arrived in my inbox from the address of a well-known publisher. That’s always a moment that lifts the heart for a few hopeful seconds.
I opened it to find a short message from an editor to tell me that he was about to publish Robert Harris’s latest novel, which was going to be called The Ghost.
‘The central character is a ghostwriter and Mr Harris would like to quote your ghostwriting handbook at the start of each chapter.’
Robert Harris had read my handbook on ghostwriting? That was a concept that took a bit of getting used to. I was so shocked I said ‘yes’ before I’d even thought of asking for any money. The kind publisher sent me a copy of the manuscript and it was brilliant – it was Robert Harris for heaven’s sake. He had caught the ghostwriter’s world exactly. He opened every chapter with a quote from my book, starting with: ‘Of all the advantages that ghosting offers, one of the greatest must be the opportunity that you get to meet people of interest.’
Finding himself writing about a profession of which he knew little he had ordered a few books on the subject for research purposes. Mine had managed to catch his imagination and had helped him to picture the world of his leading (and unnamed) character.
Harris’s book was controversial from the start because the media assumed that the other main protagonist – a former Prime Minister who had dragged the country into a fruitless war on the coat-tails of America and was now having his autobiography ghosted – was based on Tony Blair. It was well known that Harris had been a big supporter of Blair at the beginning but had become deeply disillusioned over Iraq (along with most of the country). Harris doggedly, and unconvincingly, denied the connection.
The publisher threw a mighty launch party in a stately club in St James’s, packing it with famous media faces. Having been a BBC reporter before he was a bestselling author, it is quite possible that Harris is the best-connected novelist in the country.
Things went up a gear when Roman Polanski expressed an interest in turning it into a film. Ewan McGregor was cast as the ghost (no complaints there), and Pierce Brosnan was to play the Prime Minister. (I doubt if Tony Blair had any complaints about that particular bit of casting either, even though it was strongly denied that the Prime Minister character was based on him. What man would complain about being portrayed by James Bond?)
Another gale of publicity hit the film during production when Polanski was put under house arrest for the statutory rape charge that had been keeping him out of the States for more than 30 years. He and Harris continued to work on the film together from Polanski’s chalet in Gstaad.
At a press preview of the final film in a private Soho cinema my wife leaned across to me after only a few minutes.
‘Ewan McGregor’s saying all the same things you say,’ she whispered.
Damn, should have asked for a fee.
A confession of conceit
I’m always banging on to journalists that one of the main attributes required for ghostwriting is that you need to be able to suspend your ego, and I certainly stand by it as a necessary part of the process. I have done a pretty good job over the years of keeping mine sedated, but I have to confess that there have been times, in between ghosting assignments, when my ego has broken through like one of those white stage tigers in Las Vegas that savaged their trainer, so this is a confession of those moments of conceit.
Seeing how successful the construction of Robert Harris’s book, The Ghost, was, reinforced my own long-held belief that ghostwriters make excellent central characters and narrators for fictional adventures. Like policemen, private detectives, lawyers and doctors, their lives are made up of bite-sized dramatic episodes. Every time an enquiry comes in from a potential client you have the starting point for a plot, which can be wrapped up at the end with the publication (or shelving) of the book.
Following through on that theory I have twice written novels with ghostwriters as narrators. The first was Maisie’s Amazing Maids, which drew on my experiences of human trafficking and the stories of bar girls I had met in the Far East, and was sold to a publisher called Stratus by Andrew Lownie, afterwards republished through his own imprint, Thistle. Later I wrote Secrets of the Italian Gardener, narrated by a
ghostwriter who is working for a Middle Eastern dictator just as the Arab Spring awakens to topple him, an idea that came to me after taking tea with Mrs Mubarak and meeting other powerful figures in the region at that time.
I showed Secrets of the Italian Gardener to Robert Kirby at United Agents. Robert is an agent I have worked with a great deal over the years. He was the eager young assistant to the legendary agent Giles Gordon when he first responded to my ‘Ghostwriter for Hire’ ad and went on to become one of the founders of United Agents, now amongst the biggest and most successful agencies in London. He was extremely encouraging over dinner in a restaurant in Soho’s Tin Pan Alley. He told me it was, ‘a contemporary recasting of Ecclesiastes, a story about the vanity associated with the desire for power and possessions and ultimately about the cycle of birth, growth, death and rebirth’ – which was a surprise, but by no means an unpleasant one. Fired up on food and wine we felt optimistic that we would be able to get a quick sale to a traditional publisher.
Six months later Robert had to admit that he had failed to convince any publishers to come into business with us on this one. In the old days that would have been the end of the story and the manuscript would have been consigned to a drawer somewhere, the wasted time written off to experience. Things had changed, however, and simple self-publishing was now an option. But I had heard of a new service from Amazon, which they were calling their ‘White Glove Service’. This seemed to me to offer yet another, and to my mind far preferable, alternative.
It is my belief that almost all the innovations that Amazon has brought to/forced on the publishing and bookselling industries over the last couple of decades have eventually worked to the advantage of authors and readers. I am quite sure that if I were a publisher or a bookseller I would feel very differently about the rise of Amazon to virtual world dominance, but I’m not. As both an author and a reader I love the many ways in which they have enriched my life. They had created the White Glove Service in conjunction with established literary agents with a view to helping those agents to publish and promote books for their clients that they had been unable to persuade traditional publishers to take on, or which had fallen out of print.
Robert Kirby’s assistant, Holly Thompson, an ex-publisher herself, proceeded to copy-edit the manuscript and then did all the heavy lifting with getting the book up onto Amazon, ready for print-on-demand as well as electronic publication, liaising with them about prices and promotions in a way that no author would ever be able to do on his or her own. The process provided several advantages over straightforward self-publishing because it meant the project had become a team effort rather than a lone author’s voice in the crowd and should the book start to ‘gain traction’ in the market place (and offers for film rights came in pretty quickly), one of the biggest agencies in London was already fully engaged and ready to handle the business side of taking it to the next level.
Once the book existed it started to garner good reviews. In the first promotion that Amazon included it in a few months later, it became Kindle’s number one political book within a few days, apparently allowing it to enter into the black magic world of ‘improved metadata and algorithms’, whatever that might mean.
Guilt and self-doubt
Much of my day is eaten up with feeling guilty that I am not doing enough of whatever it is I should be doing. I know that in order to earn a living I must put in a certain number of hours a day at the keyboard, which means that every hour that I spend making coffee, reading the paper, browsing the internet or faffing about in the garden is potentially ‘wasted’.
I know that it is sensible to finish the book with the closest deadline before allowing myself to be distracted by the interesting new project which has just arrived and which is not yet earning any money, but often that temptation is impossible to resist. Then there is the guilt attached to not writing as many words as I think perhaps I should, or perhaps not editing them tightly enough, or the fear that perhaps I’m just not good enough to be earning my living as a writer at all.
All the time self-doubt is nagging away at the back of my mind, telling me that I have been lucky to get away with earning my living in such an enjoyable way for this long and sooner or later I am going to be exposed as a fraud and no more work will ever come my way.
When the children were small I felt guilty for not working hard enough to provide them with financial security, and then I felt guilty for always being away or distracted or locked in my office when I should have been giving them more attention, despite the fact that I stood on the sidelines of a million school netball matches and events involving horses and children doing incredibly dangerous-looking things, feeling guilty as I did so about the hours of potential work that were seeping away as I cheered on the offspring.
I feel guilty for having to work in the evening because I’ve procrastinated all day, and then I feel guilty for starting to write earlier in the day without putting as much thought and research into the project as perhaps I should have done.
Is it possible, however, that these sorts of guilt and self-doubt are the fuels which drive us, and that without them we would simply stay in bed all day watching television and ordering takeaways?
The awesome power of a tear on daytime television
The book I had written for my client was dribbling into the shops at the usual dismal speed, when the author was invited onto one of the morning television sofas. For a moment it looked like his nerves would not allow him to accept and it seemed that the publisher’s publicity lady might well die of disappointment, but with a remarkable show of courage and much encouragement from his wife, he steeled himself and took the plunge.
Under the glare of the spotlights, the sweat prickling through his make-up, he told the story of his childhood and everything he had suffered at the hands of a cruel mother, following that up with a painful coming-of-age story.
His vulnerability struck a chord in the motherly heart of the famous presenter on the opposite couch. She looked as if she just wanted to envelop him in her arms and protect him from the world. The watching public must have felt the same. When she reached for a tissue and dabbed a tear from her eye the distribution machinery inside one of the mightiest and most prestigious publishers in the world awoke and stirred into action.
By the following morning there were stacks of the book in every shop and by the following Sunday it was top of the Sunday Times bestseller list.
An avalanche had been set in motion by a single tear on daytime television.
Christina Foyle, queen of all she surveyed
When I arrived in London in 1970, a wide-eyed 17-year-old, Richard Nixon was in the White House, Edward Heath was taking over from Harold Wilson in Downing Street, the Beatles were breaking up and Foyles was the pre-eminent London bookshop by far.
It was huge, rambling and scruffy and so old-fashioned Dickens would not have looked out of place in any of its shambolic departments. The shortest route between floors was via a bare concrete stairwell which surrounded a clanking lift shaft. It had the most ridiculous payment system ever invented, involving queuing two or even three times at different counters, and a reputation for treating its employees as virtual, if willing, slaves.
Hovering over all this was a penthouse, the London home of the fragrant Christina Foyle (she had a fantastic, peacock-strewn country house as well), who had been working in the shop since 1928. Her father had founded the bookselling business with his brother in 1903; later they moved to Charing Cross Road. Her biggest claim to fame was the founding of the ‘Foyles Literary Lunches’; vast, glittering affairs held in the grandest hotel ballrooms of Park Lane, bringing ‘writers and thinkers’ together with their readers. Virtually all the most famous names of the twentieth century ended up at one of these lunches eventually, either as performers or as guests on Miss Foyle’s high table.
A few years later I was commissioned by a magazine to do a series of profiles of interesting London figures. Having just published my first n
ovel (the publisher was a magnificently eccentric Nigerian by the name of Dillibe Onyeama, who had shot to fame with his own autobiography controversially entitled Nigger at Eton), I had personal reasons for wanting to meet this woman who ruled London’s literary landscape. I made tentative enquiries of the bookshop staff, who were obviously puzzled by the very concept of something as vulgar as press relations but promised to pass my request on.
Eventually summoned to a conservatory in the penthouse for tea, I met a woman who seemed to me to be exactly as the Queen herself would be in such circumstances. Later, when Margaret Thatcher came to power, I realised I could also see elements of the same steely, handbag style of charm. It was like being granted an audience with a very grand great aunt, the sort of tea-party conversation I had watched my mother indulging in throughout my childhood. We sat amongst the palms, gazing out across the rooftops of Soho, sipping from wafer thin china cups. She asked me gracious questions about my novel and politely assured me she would make sure it was well stocked in the shop. The interview ended and I wrote the piece.
A few months later an impressively stiff invitation arrived at my room in a shared flat in Earls Court, inviting me to sit on the high table at the next Foyles Literary Lunch. The format of these lunches was always the same. There would be one or two main speakers, who were usually people with potentially bestselling books to promote, and the rest of their long table would be filled with invited guests who tended to be people whom Miss Foyle knew or whom she was grooming for future events. All the other tables were filled with the paying customers, who came to eat, listen, buy books and have them signed. The people on the high table would all sit along one side and in my memory they were raised slightly higher than the rest to afford better visibility to the masses – but my memory may have become confused by artists’ depictions of the Last Supper.
Confessions of a Ghostwriter Page 9