Ghost writers are rubbish

by Linda Watson-Brown - 09:50 on 02 September 2009

A lovely lady called Fiona Tankard has a lovely website called spiderywriting.com - Fiona and I have a good old moan on a frequent basis about our lives (which, to be honest, is a bit rich from her given that she lives in Italy and isn't on a permanent diet, but I'll let that pass as she is very nice to me), but she recently had something Very Shocking said to her.  A client mentioned to a friend that she was working with Fiona, who is also a ghost writer, and said 'friend' pointed out that there was no point.  If ghost writers were any good, they'd be writing their own stuff.

Well.

Should I not get a plumber round to put a sink in because, if he's any good, he'd be putting another one in his own house?

OK, I'll be generous - there may be a grain of truth in what this creature has said, but that's why it pays to do your research and find out exactly what you're getting from a ghost writer. Like many professions, it's relatively easy to set yourself up as a ghost writer - and I guess the unscrupulous could always say that they've signed confidentiality agreements with all their top notch projects and are sworn to secrecy about the incredible success they've had!

However, any decent ghost writer has plenty of success to show. I would also agree that success in other fields is useful too. When I tell people that I've only been ghost writing for five years or so, there are some who think that isn't enough of an 'apprenticeship', and I probably used to be quite apologetic - but I've been writing forever really, from school competitions to school and university magazines, throughout English and Politics undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, when I worked on a music magazine in the 1980s, when I was a lecturer, when I wrote Open University textbooks, when I was a journalist, when I was a researcher, etc etc.

I met someone recently who had looked at my website in advance. 'Oh,' he said, 'you've jumped about a fair bit, haven't you?' I immediately went into 'yes, you're right, I am rubbish,' mode but, actually, there has been such an obvious theme of writing throughout my life that anyone with a pea for a brain can see that's been the continuity.

It makes perfect sense to employ a ghost writer for so many reasons - we provide a service that is often based on years of experience, but we are also often very successful at getting many, many books published. I guess some people just don't like that. There is a snobbery attached to ghost writing which rarely comes from the writers themselves. I think we're often seen as the dirty end of writing, helping people to get their stories out there when they themselves haven't sweated blood to do it. What a lot of nonsense. Here's a secret - I don't sweat blood to do it either, but what I can do is be that bridge between outdated notions of who 'deserves' to have their story told and who hasn't made the cut. I'm delighted to be involved in bringing down any outmoded barriers which try to protect story telling as the preserve of the indulged few.

Pah.

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