Confessions of a Ghostwriter

by Andrew Crofts

  ‘Someone in Hollywood wants to buy an option,’ is indeed a heart-warming message to get from an agent or publisher. It leads to a heady rush of euphoria, and sometimes a reasonable, but never life-changing, payment. The option is usually for six months or a year and is merely an agreement that you will not allow any other film or television company to buy the rights during that period. The producer then does their best to raise the money to make the film. One year is almost never long enough and they then have to decide if they want to renew the option.

  Raising the money to make a film is a lot harder than raising the money to publish a book (which is now even cheaper thanks to digital publishing). A film crew and cast always cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, often millions, so the chances of any producer pulling it off in a year are always gossamer thin.

  Despite the odds stacked against them, however, people continue to dream of becoming film producers, just as they dream of becoming authors. We all continue to hope that our latest project will be the one that will take off and become the next James Bond or Harry Potter, and in the meantime we keep on selling the film options year after year and enjoying ludicrously optimistic meetings in the sunshine of Los Angeles or the buzzing back streets of Soho, where famous names are bandied about as potential directors and stars before the money has even been raised or the script written.

  I have literally lost count of the number of different producers and film companies who have bought options for Sold over the last 20 years. They have been based in London, Tel Aviv, Los Angeles and virtually every city in between and all of them share the same glowing optimism when they first take up the option, certain that they will be the ones who manage to bring it to fruition. Sometimes they give up after six months, sometimes they hang on in for a few years, renewing every few months, always certain that they are just about to pull the whole deal together and start shooting if they could just be given a little more time. Everything from getting a book published to getting a movie made always takes longer than anyone ever expects. We all need to be given a little more time.

  Having said that, of course, all the world’s most successful projects also started with the same mixture of hope and delusion. No one is ever going to win the lottery if they don’t buy a ticket.

  The strange delusions of world leaders

  It’s a funny old thing, power. If someone has spent any number of years running a country or a giant corporation, coming to the end of your reign inevitably sends you a little bit mad.

  To be honest, the madness probably takes root while they are still in power, when they are surrounded by yes-men and flatterers who never point out when they are being delusional, or just plain odd. I’m told by those who know about these things that eight years is probably the longest that you can hold high office before you start to lose touch with reality.

  One of the first things they find when they return to the real world is that time hangs pretty heavy once they are out of office. If you’re used to having every moment of your day scheduled and overseen by a crack team of assistants and advisers it must be disorienting to wake up and realise that if you want the day to be interesting you are going to have to make it happen yourself. There must also be a terrible realisation of their own mortality. ‘Is that it?’ the ex-world leaders must think to themselves. ‘Are my best years now behind me?’

  Almost certainly the answer to that is ‘yes’. No matter how much money they accrue on the lecture circuit or how many charitable causes they make happen, nothing will ever quite match the moment of being voted President or Prime Minister of any country in the world. No matter how many billions you may find you have control of, nothing will match the excitement of starting your own bank against the odds somewhere dangerous in the developing world, and seeing it rise up the ranks of global institutions.

  So in their early days out of power, when they are still trying to work out who they are and what they are going to do with their remaining days on the planet, these people often think that they will write a book. They want to ‘set the record straight’ and they also want to make some money while their names are still recognised by at least a proportion of the paying public.

  They are not always the easiest of people to deal with in those early post-power days. They are still used to getting everything they want the moment they want it, summoning people to their presence whatever the time or whatever the day. Some of them go a little wild with the freedom of being out of office – a bit like kids on the first day of the school holidays. In some cases that can mean that the ghostwriter is bombarded with unrealistic deadlines and other demands (I had one such client who required me to read the whole manuscript out loud to him because he was having trouble concentrating on the written words), and it can also mean that the ghost has to compete for the client’s attention with other distractions, such as expensive Russian hookers. I find it is always a good idea to have a book with you if you are going to have to wait for your client to finish off in the bedroom before gracing you with his full(ish) attention.

  It is usually a few years before they start to behave anything like normal people with normal expectations, perhaps regaining some of the charm and vision that first catapulted them to success.

  Authors regain a little self-control

  The explosion of self-publishing in the twenty-first century took everyone by surprise, particularly the existing publishers. It was one of those things that we didn’t know we wanted until we had it – like televisions and mobile phones. In some ways, however, it is merely a small move back towards the fundamentals of being a storyteller.

  In the beginning there were only storytellers and the people who made up their audiences as they moved from town to town, village to village. Then the storytellers learned to write and the audiences learned to read.

  Next came the middlemen offering bags of gold and countless ideas on how to bring these two sets of people together more effectively. Some offered to print the words, design covers and transport the results to the audiences. Others offered to open shops where the stories could be displayed and promised they would be able to ensure that the stories were talked about and praised by all the right people.

  Then they offered the possibilities of dramatising the most favoured stories on stages and screens, building cinemas and theatres for the audiences to come to and inventing radios and televisions which would carry the stories into people’s homes.

  All these services that the middlemen were offering were so useful to the storytellers and to their audiences that both became lazy, willing to allow the middlemen to do all the hard and boring work on their behalf, leaving themselves free to stay home and do the things they liked the best – writing, reading, watching and listening.

  The middlemen grew increasingly powerful and soon the storytellers were more worried about pleasing them than they were about pleasing their audiences. The business people became the ones who decided what stories would and would not be told.

  The storytellers spent all their energies trying to impress the middlemen and trying to persuade them to help. Those who failed to do so grew despondent and bitter. Then, when the publishers became too busy to read everything that was sent to them, the storytellers had to turn their attention to pleasing the agents who sprang up to serve the publishers.

  And so it had come to pass that it was now the poor storytellers who were offering their services to the middlemen rather than the other way round, and the audiences could only gain access to the stories that had been blessed by those middlemen.

  A lot of people were able to make a lot of money, of course, because that is what the middlemen are particularly good at, but this was not the way that things were meant to be when the storytellers first started and they began to feel ill at ease.

  Then one day, in a dazzling flash of light, the internet appeared in everyone’s lives and suddenly the middlemen with all their bags of gold didn’t seem so important. Their services did not seem quite as useful because the
storytellers found that with a little more effort, and without having to leave their homes, they could go straight to their audiences again, using a service which seemed to be almost as free and open as the country roads they had strolled along before the middlemen first arrived. Self-publishing, which had been damned as mere vanity during the reign of the middlemen, suddenly seemed a perfectly reasonable way to lay your goods out for the public to view.

  Within a very short time most authors had learned how to publish themselves, or knew someone who could do it for them. Then came another development: the pop-up bookshop. Some of the authors who found it impossible to get their wares into the established retailers simply set up their own pop-up shops in premises that had been rendered dark by the high street crisis.

  Whenever authors get together we can be heard complaining about those who we work alongside. We complain that our agents never return our calls; our publishers never promote our books and the booksellers then refuse to display them with the prominence they deserve.

  Digital publishing called our bluff on the first two because we can now publish and promote our own stuff, so we have no one to blame but ourselves if things don’t go as well as they did in our dreams. With pop-up shops any author who thought they could do better than Waterstones now has a chance to put their money where their mouth is.

  If authors can be their own agents and their own publishers and their own booksellers we will never be able to complain about anything ever again – apart from the readers, of course, and no author ever complains about their readers, only the lack of them.

  Standing on the past

  The Southeast Branch of the Society of Authors was trying its hand at a pop-up bookshop for members in the Tunbridge Wells area.

  It wasn’t until I showed up at the mighty shopping mall that was going to be housing the shop, that I realised it was squatting on the site of my first holiday job as a scenery painter for the town’s summer repertory company. My mother had seen an article about the place in the local paper while I was at school and had managed to wangle me a temporary apprenticeship.

  I must have been 15 because I hadn’t yet been presented with a scooter for my sixteenth birthday and had to catch the bus in each day from the village where my parents lived to a back-street laundry that had been converted into a theatre workshop.

  I was apprenticed to an entertaining but world-weary Scottish designer, who would disappear from the workshop virtually as soon as the pubs opened, leaving me to happily munch my sandwiches amongst the scenery, props and costumes, dreaming of becoming a future Shakespeare, Wilde, Coward, Stoppard, or whoever was holding my imagination at the time, until closing time.

  Forty-five years later I was back, inside the shopping mall that had crushed all the small streets of the area, including that one with the converted laundry, watching thousands of shoppers bustling around on top of my past. At the entrance to the mall a woman in costume was handing out flyers for the Christmas pantomime being staged at the same theatre I had helped paint scenery for.

  The creation of Steffi McBride

  One of my daughters was at drama school and I understood enough about the acting business to know that when she left she would be entering one of the most difficult and crowded professions in the world – offering even more opportunities for heartbreak than trying to write for a living.

  In order to make a start she needed to have something that she could show to potential agents and casting directors. Every graduating drama student in the world would have photographs and all of them would be trying to persuade the gatekeepers of the industry that they deserved to be given a chance. She needed some sort of calling card which could be easily accessed, would show off her abilities and would stick in the memory of those who saw it.

  It occurred to me that if I wrote a book which was narrated by a young girl breaking into show business and the celebrity world, I could ask my daughter to make a short film in the form of a monologue by the main character, which we could then post on YouTube as a promotion for the book, at the same time making it available and easily accessible at the touch of a button or two to anyone whom she might be approaching about possible representation or casting.

  So, I conjured the character up in my head and ghostwrote for her in much the same way as I would have done if she had been one of the real-life actresses or celebrities I had worked with over the years. The result, The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride, is the tale of a young girl who is talent-spotted at a local drama class by the casting director of the country’s biggest soap opera and is catapulted into the tawdry world of modern celebrity. Once she is famous family skeletons emerge from the shadows, providing the dramatic tension and surprises needed to keep the plot rolling along.

  The book was agented by Barbara Levy and published by John Blake, with my daughter’s picture on the cover, and the YouTube monologue worked as planned.

  A year or two later I was approached by some freelance film producers wanting to make a pilot episode for television with my daughter in the lead role and it looked as if it was going to provide exactly the sort of break she needed. The producers then patiently embarked on several years of meetings, trying to raise money and gain distribution for their project. It takes so long, however, to raise the necessary money to make even a half hour television pilot, that by the time they were actually ready to film, my daughter had grown too old to play the part which had originally been written for her. Life for a freelance actress (and freelance film producers for that matter) is definitely even more of a bitch than life for a freelance writer.

  Encouraged by the success of Steffi I persuaded the publisher to commission a prequel, The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer, which followed the earlier career of Steffi’s mother, who just happened to be the same age as me and arrived in the same part of London at roughly the same time (she left home at 15 whereas I had waited another two years), her head filled with much the same dreams and delusions as mine; the writer’s ego once again struggling to be free of its chains.

  A gathering of ghosts

  In amongst the queries from potential clients that arrive in my inbox every day, there are often letters from other writers who are searching for tips on how to become ghostwriters themselves.

  I try my best to be helpful (and to tempt them to buy my own handbook on the subject), and if their query is related to finding an agent there are one or two whom I will recommend because I know that they use ghosts a lot and I also know that they respond quickly and helpfully to anyone who approaches them. Lack of response from people who should be perfectly capable of at least being polite is all too common and can be very wearing on the spirit for people who are already struggling with the difficulties of earning their living by writing.

  As Halloween 2013 approached Andrew Lownie, one of these agents and a man whom I have worked with a lot over the years (and who also founded the Biographers’ Club), announced he was going to throw a ‘ghosts’ party’.

  Although I have from time to time met other ghostwriters individually or even in small groups, this was the first time I had heard of someone this well connected in the publishing business inviting a large number of us to congregate under one roof.

  Lownie’s house rests in a Dickensian street in Westminster, nestling close to the Abbey, the traditional burial place of British monarchs and the scene of all their coronations since 1066. It seemed a very suitable area for ghosts old and new to congregate. It was tucked well away from the loud, costumed revellers already weaving around Victoria Street and Parliament Square amongst the crowds of workers heading home.

  By the time I arrived the elegant first floor reception rooms were already thronged with ghosts. There were some I had met but many more were physical incarnations of names that had merely passed through my email box over the years, appearing before me now in corporeal form for the first time.

  What was unusual and heartening about the merry throng was that many of them were young, ambitious and excited by
the jobs they were getting. Usually when any number of authors are gathered together in one place the average age of the room is startlingly high and the conversations are peppered with woeful tales of financial struggles, disappointed dreams and pessimism about the future of storytelling. This gathering of ghosts, however, was imbued with a surprisingly refreshing spirit.

  Meeting the daughter of God

  The email was very matter-of-fact. The sender was a well-established international business woman. She was passing through London and would like to meet up for a chat about a possible book. Almost as an aside, she mentioned that she was the daughter of God.

  I did a bit of googling, as I now do whenever I get an approach out of the blue, and there was plenty to read about her business career, although nothing about her unusual parentage. I was not the first person she had told about it, but this was going to be the first time she had considered stepping out into the public spotlight.

  She was staying at the Four Seasons Hotel at the bottom of Park Lane (the same establishment in which billionaire Howard Hughes spent many of his final and most reclusive years, at which time it was called Inn on the Park) and asked if I would like to join her for lunch.

  There seemed two possibilities here. Either she was mistaken about who her real father was or her birth was the most important thing to happen in the world for a couple of millennia. I decided it was worth investigating further. If she had invited me to talk about a business book I would have gone, so this possible extra dimension to the story did not seem a good reason to refuse to listen to her.

  The lunch was good. The lady was charming and entirely sincere in her beliefs, but in the end she decided that the time was not yet right to ‘come out’ to the world. Maybe she will change her mind again later. I hope so. It would be a fun book to write.