Addiction to charts
More than once I have allowed myself to become as addicted to watching the bestseller charts as I am to gin, caffeine and emails; desperate all the time for a new fix, even though I know it will inevitably lead to another painful comedown.
I can completely understand why ego-crazed pop stars are driven tantrum mad when some giant-selling track from a rival act squats at the top of the charts for months on end, forever depriving them of the ultimate glory they believe to be their right. To be number two or three is great, of course, but to be able to label your book merely ‘a Sunday Times bestseller’ is never going to be the same as being ‘a number one bestseller’.
So many times I have ghosted a potential chart topper, only to be held off the top spot by some other mega-selling celebrity author or freak hit from household names like Jeremy Clarkson and Jamie Oliver, Bill Bryson and Sharon Osbourne, Katie Price and Alex Ferguson, Barack Obama and One Direction (not to mention the Bible, the Highway Code and Who Moved My Cheese?).
I know my addiction is illogical, that a book which sells a thousand copies a week for 20 years and never features in any charts is an infinitely better earner than one that surges out of the starting gate with a 10,000 sale in the first week and has completely petered out by the end of the year. I know it because I have had those too, but I am still addicted to the adrenaline rush of the quick number one surge. The pleasures and rewards of sensible moderation are subtler and require a degree of patience that I always have difficulty in mastering whenever the painful yearning for personal validation takes hold.
More dangerous even than the charts in newspapers like the Sunday Times, the New York Times, Publishers Weekly and The Bookseller, are the Amazon rankings. This is a virtual casino that feeds both my paranoia and my normally suppressed ego as a writer in a dizzying, aerobatic display of highs and lows. Where the printed charts only provide weekly fixes I can now get fresh highs and lows every few hours by logging onto Amazon and looking up any one of the titles that I have a vested interest in.
As with all drugs, you take your first hit out of curiosity, thinking that you can handle it. You see that your ‘sales rank’ is pleasantly high – let’s say you are at number 1,000. Thinking this is a good omen you go back the next day to see if you have climbed any higher – you have, you are now down to three figures. You experience a ludicrously pleasant rush of optimism and now they’ve got you.
The next time you tune in you have plummeted, maybe in the space of just a few hours, to number 10,000. How can this be? You are immediately filled with angst. Has your publisher failed to send them a new order? Has a bad review appeared somewhere and halted sales in their tracks? Or are you simply doomed to a future of abject failure, your children destined to beg on the streets?
You tentatively go back in a few hours later and, miracle of miracles, you are back in three figures. You are high again, thrilled with yourself and the world. Now you are Amazon’s slave. It will only be a matter of time before you are unable to stop yourself from checking in almost every hour. It will become a new distraction from the job of writing as irresistible as making another cup of coffee (each cup a little stronger than the last, but that’s another story).
Tales from below stairs
When someone introduces themselves over the phone with one of the most famous names on the planet, it can be disorienting. The call had come late in the evening from Hollywood, at a time of day when it was a surprise for the phone to ring at all. My brain, comfortably addled by supper, gin and television, had difficulty clicking onto an entirely new track at a moment’s notice. The name sounded eerily familiar but I couldn’t think why. Then I remembered that it was the name of an extremely famous film star, but assumed that this must be someone else with the same name. Then I remembered the connection and tried to work out what she was talking about.
That whole mental process was probably no more than a few seconds and was probably indiscernible to the woman on the other end of the line, who appeared to be angry before the conversation even began.
‘We’ve received this manuscript from the Johnsons,’ she said and the whole thing clicked into place.
Mr and Mrs Johnson had worked for this star and her even-more-famous film star husband. Mrs Johnson had been their housekeeper when they were at their house in England while Mr Johnson had been the chauffeur and general handyman. They had approached me because they wanted to tell an affectionate insiders’ tale of life with one of the most celebrated Hollywood couples. It had been a pleasant if uncontroversial story and I thought the fame of their employers might be enough to get the Johnsons a publishing deal. I interviewed them and produced a synopsis. Throughout history servants have been a rich source of material for writers of both fiction and non-fiction. They often get to places the rest of us can never hope to see, and sometimes have front row seats at historic events.
‘Before we send this to any agents or publishers,’ I told the Johnsons, ‘you need to get it cleared by your former employers.’
‘That’ll be fine,’ they said. ‘We get on really well. They’re more like friends than employers.’
‘Should be fine then,’ I agreed, and promptly forgot about the whole thing as I was in the middle of writing something else. I assumed there would be a short hiatus and then the stars would give their blessing to this friendly little project. I certainly hadn’t expected that Mrs Megastar would feel sufficiently incensed to put in a call herself – usually incensed megastars get their lawyers to write letters.
‘I don’t know what they’re thinking,’ she said. ‘There’s no way we want the details of our home life published in a book. If we wanted to do that we’d write it ourselves. They signed confidentiality contracts when we took them on so they can’t do it anyway …’
Fortunately the would-be authors had told her that it was my idea that they should ask permission before continuing with the project, and she was grateful to me for that, but listening to her perfectly justified indignation I realised that she and her husband had a very different idea of their relationship with the Johnsons. Just because they had been ‘friendly’ towards them while they were in their employ, they had never at any stage thought of themselves as ‘friends’ with the couple. The social chasm between ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’ had not really moved that far from where it had been a century before. Once she had vented her fury and realised that I was agreeing with everything she said, she calmed down, promised to contact me if she ever decided to tell her own story and the entire project melted away.
Employees of the rich and famous often go looking for ghostwriters and sometimes they do have stories of genuine interest. Princess Diana’s publicity-hungry butler was perhaps the most vivid example of the breed and there have been many other royal tales from nannies, housekeepers, bodyguards, interior decorators and illegitimate children who want their illustrious lineage to be acknowledged.
It’s astonishing how many of history’s alpha males sired children with the women who worked for them. Arnold Schwarzenegger merely joined onto the end of a long conga line when he admitted to having a son with his family’s housekeeper. The Lord alone knows how far the European royal families have spread their DNA through the families of those who have worked for them.
If people work in service industries like the hotel business or limousine hire or security they can often write generic exposés of their employers and there is also a market for stories about life ‘below stairs’ in private houses (the ‘Downton Abbey Syndrome’ perhaps), and I guess you could say this book falls into this category.
The best of these stories can be delicious concoctions of gossip and social observation and can provide an insight into how life works in households that are very different to those of most of their readers … but most aren’t.
A confession of cowardice
Writing a book in someone else’s voice allows the ghostwriter to abdicate responsibility for anything that is said. The rele
ase from that responsibility compensates for the inability to express your own views. In one way it makes it easier to tell a story dramatically and to introduce readers to the personality of the subject, but it is also an act of cowardice, a way of hiding behind a mask. It makes it much easier to express outrageous opinions, to justify shocking behaviour, if you are using someone else’s voice and letting them face any hostile responses that might come from readers.
Maybe it is the same with fiction. Some stories would be hard to tell effectively without a narrator. Would Vladimir Nabokov have been able to make Lolita palatable if he had viewed Humbert, Lolita’s seducer, objectively? By allowing Humbert to be the teller of the story he could make it easier for the reader to understand why the man acted as he did, perhaps even to empathise with him despite the fact that his crime would be despicable to virtually everyone. The glamour and drama of life at Brideshead and Jay Gatsby’s mansion were all the more evocative for having been viewed through the eyes of the impressionable young narrators, Charles Ryder and Nick Carraway, who were actually there and actually affected by the events that occurred.
By taking on the role of a ghost, the writer is effectively, and perhaps cravenly, handing over responsibility for the truth to the narrator or client.
Writing in two voices at once
Sometimes a story can be most effectively told by taking more than one viewpoint. I’ve written several books where we have alternated between two or more voices. There was a couple who wanted to write about the man’s ordeal as an inmate in a third world prison and his girlfriend’s struggle to get him released. We were able to move the reader between the shocking details of the man’s experiences inside a cramped, airless prison cell shared with a dozen others, and the desperate story of his girlfriend who could find no way to reach out to her partner. By cutting back and forth you can achieve much the same effect as a film director might employ to tell such a story.
In another book I wrote for two girls who were travelling together when their plane was hi-jacked and crash landed in the sea. They both had roughly the same story to tell of their near-death experiences, but by alternating their voices we were able to see events through the eyes of two different personalities. If told from just one perspective there probably would not have been enough words for a full-length book.
In another bestselling book, My Secret Sister, ghosted by Jacquie Buttriss, siblings separated at birth and put up for adoption told parallel stories of their lives and their long searches for one another in two distinct voices, until they eventually came together at the end of the story – a narrative trick worthy of a bestselling novelist.
Just a single copy
He had spent his life travelling the world and trading, building a mighty conglomerate of companies, most of them market leaders in their sectors but none of them household names and none of their products remotely sexy. He was 60 years old and his only daughter had just presented him with his first grandson, who had been named after him.
He couldn’t help himself from beaming with pride as he passed a photograph of the boy across the lunch table at his club in Pall Mall.
‘When he is 40,’ he said, ‘and I am long gone, and he visits his mother and asks what exactly Grandpa did to make so much money, I want her to be able to send him to her library where this book will be waiting for him. We only need to print up one copy, but it must be done beautifully and it will tell him all the things I would be able to tell him if he was sitting here with me now. I want to tell him about my parents and my grandparents, about where they came from and what they did to help me get started, and then I want to explain how I built the company.’
He was under no illusion that the book would ever be of interest to the general public, although I did convince him that it would be worth printing up a few dozen copies so that it could go into various archives within the company as well, for the use of future historians. In essence, however, all he wanted was an 80,000 word letter to his grandson. It was a joy to be working with such a specific and achievable brief, not having to worry about finding agents or publishers or scheming how to get it into the shops and the charts.
Family secrets
‘Hah!’ My wife’s jubilant exclamation jerked me back from the reverie I had drifted into with the aid of the fire crackling in the grate, the television burbling in the background and the gin numbing the anxieties of the day. ‘I knew it!’
‘What did you know?’
‘You have criminal genes. I just knew it. Convicts!’
One of my wife’s addictions, every bit as debilitating as my own mild fondnesses, is to stalking ancestors who previously believed they were resting in peace. During many happy hours on the laptop (and a considerable number of visits to libraries and other archives), she managed to dig up her own relatives back to the dawn of time and then set about mine. Through my father’s line she discovered the extraordinarily colourful family of a Victorian Archbishop of Canterbury and some alarmingly close intermarriages within a limited number of families including that of Charles Darwin. I believe limited gene pools, particularly in his own family, was one of the great man’s prime worries, and a tendency to despondency at best and complete madness at worst seemed to dog many of the stories she was uncovering with such glee. She had now started on my mother’s lineage, finding a family that had made a healthy fortune by setting up a trading company in Australia, a fortune which was frittered away and had disappeared without trace two generations later.
‘Your great, great grandparents,’ she was peering closely at her laptop screen, trying to make out handwriting two centuries old, ‘or maybe there should be another “great” in there … anyway, they ran an illegal still in Scotland. An inspector from Customs and Excise confiscated it and they attacked him with an iron bar as he was loading it onto his cart to take away. They were both arrested, tried and sent to Australia on separate convict ships. She gave birth on the trip down. When they got there they were reunited and put to work for a man who owned a massive sheep farm. Your great, great, whatever grandfather then died and his widow married the sheep farmer, her children inheriting the whole thing.’ She sat back triumphantly. ‘I knew it!’
I relate this tale of unseemly gloating because my wife is not alone in her addiction. The internet has made it possible for thousands of people, alerted by television programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are?, to dig out stories about their families. Many of them need the help of ghostwriters to put these stories into a form where they can become family heirlooms, keeping voices that would previously have disappeared into the grave with their owners alive down the centuries.
When I was a teenager my mother wrote a short memoir of growing up in the thirties. Being an arrogant adolescent with my eyes fixed on my own glorious literary future I paid her labours scant attention and she was far too modest to do more than simply type them up and leave them in a drawer. After her death, however, when I started to wonder about how her life might have been before my father and I came into it, the book – now printed and published privately by a cousin who recognised its value before I did – has been an enormous source of answers. I only wish my father, grandparents and all who came before them had done the same. Such books might only ever be of interest to a few dozen people, but their relevance to that small audience is likely to be as strong as, or even stronger than, any famous and feted work of literature.
One for the bank vaults
The lady asked me to meet her at an Italian restaurant just behind Knightsbridge but she wouldn’t give me her name. She told me she would book the table in my name. The restaurant was discreet and intimate, the tablecloths thick, smooth and gleaming white, the cutlery heavy and the wine glasses as light as feathers. The staff members were equally discreet. I presume that they were used to catering for trysts and liaisons.
Her accent on the phone had been precise and upper class. She might not be English by birth but she had almost certainly been to an English boarding school. When
she arrived I was surprised that she appeared younger than I had pictured. It was hard to imagine what her background might be. Her ancestors might have come from India or South America, or both. Most likely she was the result of several generations of high-level global mixing. Whatever her history the result took my breath away. I was pretty sure that I recognised her face from the society pages of glossy magazines, but I still had no idea who she might be.
Her manners were immaculate but she was wary, like a wild animal, apparently unsure whether I was going to turn out to be friend or foe. The waiters came and went from the table and she slowly relaxed. As she allowed snippets of her story to emerge bells rang in various compartments of my memory. I recalled seeing her pictured with a much older husband in the society pages of glossy magazines. I remembered that there was some sort of divorce being threatened and a great deal of money was at stake, as well as the custody of children. There was an estate and an inheritance, which included a stately home and some dispute over the paternity of the children in the marriage.
‘I think it will be hard to sell this to a publisher while the divorce and the court case are still under way,’ I warned. ‘The legal difficulties would make them very nervous.’
‘It is of no importance,’ she said. ‘I just want to have my story written down and then we can put it in a bank vault. I want it to be there for my children to read later so that they will know my side of the story, and I want my husband and his lawyers to know that the book exists.’
Confessions of a Ghostwriter Page 15