On Ghostwriting by Scott Westerfeld

    
PLEASE NOTE: _{Scott Westerfeld has not participated in any ghostwriting in years. Queries will be deleted and unopened}

    
This is a ghost story.

    Like any spectral tale, it deals with invisibility, secret oaths, codes and spells, and vengeful spirits. Unlike most ghost stories, it’s written from the point of view of the ghost. Me.

    I am a ghost writer, a literary doppleganger. I write books that other people take credit for. People more famous than I, or busier, or who simply can’t be trusted with a pen.

    First, a short bestiary of ghosts. Some are semi-transparent, as in the celebrity autobiography, with its “as told to . . . ” disclaimer. Those three words suggest a passive transcriber, an amiable secretary listening attentively with pen in hand. But the truth is that the “as told to . . . ” ghost is a poltergeist, noisy enough to outline, research, and even invent these autobiographies out of whole cloth.

    Another species of literary phantom is the prematurely buried co-author. Take, for example, the strange case of Robert Ludlum’s The Hades Factor, by Robert Ludlum and Gayle Lynds. Here, one author is a brand name, and the other a franchisee. I have no first-hand knowledge about how the literary duties (or royalties) were divided between Ludlum and Lynds, but to have one author’s name in the title of a novel does, methinks, protest too much.

    But these minor ghosts are pretty much in the open, a matter of record. I am the purest type of ghost, completely invisible and bound to silence. I have written for name-brand authors, celebrities, and even for other ghosts who found themselves over-extended: I’ve been a ghost-of-a-ghost. I have written legal thrillers, historical nonfiction, mysteries, and even horror (that is to say, ghost stories). But my name doesn’t appear on the covers of these books, nor on the copyright page, nor can it be found by consulting the Library of Congress. My invisibility is complete except on a contract, a document that is kept under lock and key. Sometimes, even the publishers don’t know I exist.

    To prevent confusion, the language of these contracts calls me the writer; the other guy’s the author of the book in question. I’m contractually forbidden from outing my authors. So if you’re looking for any hints as to whom they might be, you won’t find them here. Ghosts have to keep their secrets, or face lawsuits.

    When not ghosting, I do write my own books. (Ghosting supports my science fiction habit.) But when asked my profession at cocktail parties, I always identify myself as a ghost writer. Explaining one’s work to strangers is a fraught experience. Condensing a novel of my own into a few sentences is soul-depleting; I’ll leave pitching to Hollywood script writers. But when I mention ghost writing, the listener is instantly intrigued. “You’ve heard of him, but I can’t tell you who he is,” I’ll say of my latest author. The conversation becomes a guessing game. It’s like meeting a spy or a criminal, perhaps a forger. The ghost carries an air of mystery, an exciting touch of duplicity, and a haunting sense of injustice.

The actual process of ghost writing has its own nefarious rewards.

    For one thing, ghosts have to write very quickly. We are often given work that a name-brand author actually intended to write. The ghost is called in as an emergency backup, inheriting an unwieldy concept and an imminent deadline. I once wrote a 120,000-word novel in twelve weeks. That’s 2,000 words (six printed pages, or half again the length of this essay) every day for five days a week. Maintaining this sprinter’s pace at marathon length was painful, requiring much solitude, coffee, and aspirin. But there is a muscular pleasure in writing so quickly, at least under someone else’s name. The feeling is like possessing someone else’s body, then hopping into their car and driving along a dangerous road at top speed. The thrill is mine, but any wreck will be their responsibility, their injury, their loss.

    I made my 2,000-word count every single day without fail. An advantage of ghostliness: the almost right word comes considerably more quickly than the right word.

    Of course, this is not to say that I turn in bad writing to my authors. Sadly, the opposite often happens. Just as ghosts of the spectral variety are immune to bullets and can walk through walls, ghost writers are immune to second-guessing, self-sabotage, and writer’s block. In fact, when I get a block on my own novels these days, I cure it by a kind of literary suicide: I pretend that I am my own ghost.

    So, unfortunately, my ghostliness sometimes actually improves my writing. I often find myself exclaiming, “Oh, crap! This sentence is too good. This should be mine!” A recurrent nightmare is that I have finished my best work ever, the great novel I was put on this earth to write, but it’s coming out under someone else’s name. This bad dream hasn’t been realized yet, but I have ghosted lyrical paragraphs, glorious asides, and perfectly drawn characters that I wish I could reclaim.

    Reading reviews of one’s ghosted works is an equally ambivalent experience. One is partially immunized from negative comments, but any high praise is half pleasure, half pain. For the ghost, the only real satisfaction comes from the phrase “competent prose.”

Some ghosts I know are haunted by their lost kudos, and go to great lengths to put secret codes into their ghost novels. They concoct sentence-length acronyms or give minor characters anagrams of their own names, so that future historians can decipher the work’s true author. Others enjoy private jokes: inserting cats, roommates, or favorite restaurants into their ghosted books as a kind of petty claim to ownership. (Any of my authors reading this essay should note that I would never stoop to such tricks. Don’t waste your time looking.)

    A common question asked of ghosts at cocktail parties is, “So, what do the authors actually do?”

    The answer covers a considerable range. I once wrote a novel from a fifty-page outline that provided specific adjectives and images for some chapters. This specificity put me in a poltergeist-like mood, and I altered the novel extensively; it was a whodunnit, and I changed who did it. Other authors provide only a paragraph or two, a concept at the cocktail-napkin stage. Some offer little guidance up front, but attack the finished work in minute detail. They fiddle with insignificant character’s names, change chapter titles, and run search-and-replace on words they have a personal dislike for. Basically, the literary equivalent of throwing holy water around: an exorcism of ownership. This ghost cares little; I’m busy haunting somewhere else by then.

    As a rule, the most “prolific” authors are the most detached. I’ve written five books for one man whom I’ve never met or spoken to, or even e-mailed. His editors, however, assure me that he has actually read the books, and that he rather enjoyed them.

    There are many ways for authors to assume remote control. In children’s series, which can reach Nancy Drew-like longevity, ghosts are provided a “bible.” This tome is rather like the three-ring binder given to the manager of a fast-food frachises: it ensures consistency, and protects the brandname from any disturbing infusions of local color. Bibles contain the essential data of the fictional universe, such as the personal details of recurring characters: middle names, phobias, examples of their speech patterns. Like any good bible, these screeds also set down the tone and philosophy of the series. The Nancy Drew bible offers a long, mystical treatise on the meaning of something called “drewness.”

In an attempt to impose the same style on many writers, some series have quite specific grammatical restrictions. They set sentence length, vocabulary level, and even regulate punctuation. In one childrens’ series, a breathless style is created by forbidding the verb to say.

    ”Shocking!” you might intone.

    ”Yes, but true,” I would aver.

    On the adult side, things are less formalized. A good ghost is expected to be a shape-shifter, picking up the style by reading the author’s other books. I often wonder if these were in fact written by yet another ghost. Am I a copy of a copy?

    My cocktail party confessions invariably lead to the moral question: What are the implications of such duplicity? Is ghost-writing a case of false advertising? Is it simply bad manners, like bringing take-out to a potluck supper? Perhaps it’s in the tradition of the master Chinese painters of old, who signed the works of their assistants. Of course, moderns from Mark Kostabi to (reportedly) Stan Lee have done the same thing. Perhaps a book is simply a product; you either enjoyed it or not, and the author’s name is no more a personal signature than a Nike swoosh.

    This is the state we are approaching: literature a business like any other. And as in every business under capitalism, the main idea is to get rich from someone else’s labor. Someday I myself may come up with a cash-cow franchise idea, a detective or adventure series that resonates with some dependable reading demographic. I’ll write the first few, and then I’m off to Aruba. Let some other poor ghost follow my bible for a while.

    After all, I’ve gotten to know quite a few ghosts in the last decade. Between the lot of us, I could author twenty books a year without breaking a sweat. Indeed, when I picked my ghostly pals’ collective brains to write this essay, one of them even suggested that she ghost it for me, just for a laugh.

Maybe she did.

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_{Scott Westerfeld is a New York Times bestselling American-born author of science fiction and young adult literature. He was born in the U.S. state of Texas and now lives in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia and New York City. His book Evolution’s Darling was a New York Times Notable Book (2000), and won a Special Citation for the 2000 Philip K. Dick Award. His novels Peeps and Uglies were both named as Best Books for Young Adults 2006 by the American Library Association. he has als won the Victorian Premier’s Award and Aurealis Award for his fiction.}

You can visit him at scottwesterfeld.com

This article was represented at BSC with the author’s permission and all rights remain with Scott Westerfeld.

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