Ghostwriter Scribbles...
Blog on ghostwriting, and writing on a "work for hire" basis
Julie-Ann
So if you haven’t heard of Kindle, it’s the e-Book reader/marketplace that Amazon.com has set up. Right now they’re focusing on Kindle 2, the newfangled revamped version, which includes a text-to-speech function… As in, you turn the feature on, and you’ll hear your computer reading the book to you in a scary robot voice.
…Hm. You know, I’ve got nothing against books on tape, and I’ve got nothing against Doctor Stephen Hawkings, but I’m not sure I’m so hot on the idea of books on tape as read by Doctor Stephen Hawkings… Unless the book in question happens to be Hawking’s own A Brief History Of Time .
After some complaints, Amazon has decided that they’re going to offer authors and publishers the right to decide whether or not to allow for the text-to-speech function on their particular book, so that “rightsholders can decide on a title-by-title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for a particular title”.
The complaints were that this would somehow violate audio rights over the book… but let me tell you, nobody’s sitting around going “Why would I spring for the audio book as read by Sir Anthony Hopkins? I’ve got a scary computer voice shouting the story at my ears in a booming monotone, and for free!”
If you really want to hear STORY-BOT 9000 read Cormac MacCarthy’s The Road into your eardrums, you can always download a separate text-to-speech program and copy and paste a chapter at a time.
If you ask me, the whole story is kind of silly. It’s silly to think someone wants a book read to them by their computer, and it’s silly that anyone would care if this or that reader actually DOES want to do just that.
Incidentally, the complaints came not from authors, but from the “Author’s Guild”. The Authors Guild is basically a group of legal experts who charge you membership dues to look at publishing contracts for you, so… all this fuss reminds me of a good lawyer joke, what’s the difference between a “shame” and “a crying shame”?
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Did anybody watch the Oscars this year? Traditionally, the Oscars have been criticized as pompous, pretentious, and cynical, and recent years have showed low ratings for the ceremonies. Well it looks like the Awards Academy learned their lesson this year, and they actually made an effort, ironically enough, to put on a more light hearted, laid back sort of affair.
First of all, Hugh Jackman was a lot of fun, and for once, the awards went not to the fanciest flicks with the biggest budgets, but to actually entertaining films, like the action/drama/musical thriller Slumdog Millionaire.
The result? Long time critics finally caved, and long time supporters called it the best Oscar ceremony in decades.
…Except for writer Salman Rushdie.
In particular, Rushdie really didn’t like Slumdog Millionaire, and recently went on record calling the film trite, false, superficial, and a number of other things not fit for publishing on this esteemed blog.
“The adaptation (of the original novel, Slumdog Millionaire) has a plot spun out of candyfloss and cheap tricks, the sort of thing that newspapers call ‘touching’ and ‘human’, but which merely spray paint a melodramatic sheen on deeply ingrained colonial prejudice.”
Ouch!
Well… respected author and thinker or no, Rushdie is also famous for being a bit of a grouch. Slumdog is certainly based on a crazy plot device, the whole Indian Who Wants to be a Millionaire? thing, and, as Rushdie says, it’s “more fantasy and fairy tale than contemporary fiction” but it’s really a very fun flick, and a difficult movie to be cynical about, what with its energetic camera work, upbeat international pop music, and, yes, dance numbers that seem to occur for no reason whatsoever.
Salman Rushdie does have some good points, but it’s kind of ironic that he actually seems to be guilty of the same thing that the Oscar ceremony detractors typically Academy of doing: Taking movies a little too seriously.
Hey, it looks like Philip K. Dick has a new book out!
…Yes, he passed away several years ago, but you know, V.C. Andrews passed on over a decade ago and has still been releasing about one book a year since.
The book was actually written by his ex-wife, Tessa Dick. Tessa took to putting the story together herself. She started with notebooks left behind by the author as well as her own knowledge of the story gathered from the couple’s three year marriage, and wrote the majority of The Owl in Daylight herself in as close a style to Dick’s as she could replicate.
It should be noted that there will be a movie coming out this year entitled The Owl in Daylight, but don’t think you’re going to be able to fool anyone into thinking you’re a big PKD Reader by just watching the movie like with Total Recall, Blade Runner, and Minority Report. The film with the same title is actually intended to be a biopic with Giammati playing Philp K. Dick.
Tessa actually worries that the film might reduce Philip K. Dick’s complex personality into something of a tragicomic anti-hero, whether this fear proves justified remains to be seen, of course. It’s probably fair to say that Hollywood hasn’t exactly been kind to Dick. As entertaining as the above mentioned films have been, they really do reduce the author’s sometimes convoluted but always fun high concepts into little more than a platform for endless shoot outs and chase scenes.
The plot of the actual novel revolves around a brilliant computer expert who builds an artificial intelligence console in order to run a vast amusement park, only to wind up being trapped inside his own invention, and I bet you all the change in my pocket that the inevitable movie adaptation will climax with the hero duking it out with some baddie atop a neon-lit Ferris Wheel!
Now, if the reviews for this book wind up being largely positive, my advice for Tessa Dick is to capitalize on her ability to mimic famous writers and see if she can get a good job ghostwriting for famous clients!
Okay, now here’s a crazy idea; Novelists Kate Pullinger, Stefan Schemat, and Chris Joseph have been working on this thing called The Breathing Wall. It’s basically an e-book, with a really goofy twist. As you read it, you have to wear a microphone. The microphone monitors your breathing, and the only way to read deeper into the story is with controlled breathing rhythms.
What?!
I know I just wrote that, but I’m still wrapping my head around the notion!
The story combines text, image and sound to create a tale told largely through surreal daydream sequences. I kind of like that. Such a crazy concept, you have to expect a crazy story to go along with it.
On the one hand, I’m intrigued by the goofy gimmicks people come up with to tell their stories, but there’s also that doubt that’s always going to be there; are they really trying to do something new and exciting to enliven the art of storytelling, or is this just a cute way to sell a few copies of a dull story?
It’s kind of like 3D movies. Try watching one without the red and blue glasses, and you’re usually left with a bland tale of boring characters doing tedious things for no good reason, except there’s always a bunch of stuff flying at the camera lens.
Anyways, you have to maintain a relaxed, steady rhythm to your breathing if you hope to finish the story. I suppose the real gauge of how good this book really is would be… is it easy to read? Because if it is, then that means it’s not really as… breathtaking… as we usually like stories to be. I like reading the kind of books that can speed up your heart rate and have you taking short, gasping breaths as you turn the page to see what happens next, so if The Breathing Wall winds up being any good, it’ll be something of a challenge to get through.
So Stephen King was interviewed by USA Weekend a little earlier this month, and I must say, I think his publicist must have sat him down and had a long hard talk with him after the story went to print. A few choice quotes from the horror king himself…
“Dean Koontz… sometimes he’s just awful.”
“James Patterson is a terrible writer but he’s very, very successful.”
“Stephanie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”
On the one hand, you’ve got to appreciate his honesty in expressing his own uncensored opinion for what it is, and on the other hand, you have to laugh at his audacity.
Perhaps he’s just reached an age where he no longer cares whose feathers he ruffles and is willing to give straight talk even on writers like Dean Koontz, a friend and sometimes-co-author of King’s.
It’s generally part of an author’s publicity training to never go too hard on his or her peers, so really, it’s kind of refreshing to see King giving the interviewer a little more than the same old sound bytes about signing tours and “where he gets all his ideas”.
And to be fair, King tends to be just as quick to dole his criticisms out on himself, as well. He recently wrote a top ten list of his favourite movies of 2008 for Entertainment Weekly, prefacing the list with a confession of his own terrible taste in film, and when he published Blaze last year, he opened the book with a warning to the reader that this wasn’t one of his best, and that you may want to read the first chapter in the bookstore before wasting any money on it.
Now, if you really want to hear Stephen King go off on a few bad writers (including himself, at times), his memoirs/how to book On Writing comes highly recommended. If you read enough autobiographies, you get used to reading between the lines and wondering if the author is really being completely honest with the reader. In King’s case, On Writing is as fierce and merciless a portrait as anyone could paint of the man.
Aerosmith may well be the most divisive rock act out there. In some circles, they’re considered required listening, put on almost the same level as Led Zeppelin. In other circles, they’re placed about a half step up above those embarrassing hair metal bands like Poison and Bon Jovi (though on either side of the spectrum, you have to admit that Dream On is a darn good tune).
Love’em or hate’em, there’s no denying that they must have some interesting stories to tell, so even their fiercest critics are likely to gobble up Steven Tyler’s upcoming autobiography. That’s the thing about eighties rock, you don’t have to like the music, but you can’t help but admire anyone who managed to survive the decade!
Of course, Steven Tyler’s bio will not be penned by himself, but by ghost writer David Dalton. Dalton has previously written books on James Dean, and Jim Morrison, and has written numerous articles about Marianne Faithfull, The Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan... is it just me, or does this Dalton fellow seem attracted to stories of excess?
There will be a draft of the book due in June, but we’ll probably have to wait and see when the finished product is actually released. The HarperCollins imprint Ecco bid a cool two million on the rights to the book last year, though, so we can be sure they’ll be in a hurry to hit the shelves as soon as possible. Plus, Steven Tyler has always been incredibly open when sharing stories of his past. If you watch some interviews, he’s half bragging and half apologizing for his party days, so we shouldn’t expect him to pull a Bobby Brown and back out at the last second. With the publisher and the author both eager to get the book out there, a summer release date wouldn’t be surprising.
There are those of us who can’t get enough of Britney Spears and all her tabloid mischief, and then there are those of us who had more than enough of the pop queen a long time ago… and still can’t resist peeking inside the tabloids in the grocery store checkout line.
So while this sort of thing may draw plenty of criticism, you have to admit it’s a smart move on the part of all those involved: Britney Spears is currently holding “auditions”, more or less, to find a publisher for her tell-all bio.
This is actually fairly common practice. A star who knows his or her bio is going to rake in somewhere in the area of “all the money in the world”, can afford to have representatives from different publishing houses fly in to meet them, and each one tries to one-up the other with what they can offer the star for the exclusive rights to their book.
This kind of thing is very easy to criticise as lowest-common-denominator pandering, but let’s look at the facts. First of all, book sales have been declining and declining and declining in recent years. Second of all, a book “by” and about Britney Spears is going to fly off the shelves in the blink of an eye. From a business perspective, the exclusive rights to something from Spears could do a publisher a lot of good.
The funny thing is, there’s no book in plans or anything, Spears has proposed nothing. What’s more, that’s the way these deals usually work. Simply put, it’s something of a contractual promise; “If you ever want to do a book, come to us first”. If the lucky publisher who lands the contract knows what they’re doing, though, they’ll reserve the right to hire a ghost writer on their own and publish something with or without Brit’s participation.
If you look at the big picture, it’s hard to focus on the usual criticisms this sort of news evokes. Look, you’re going to have an entertaining book to flip through, and the publisher is going to earn a ton of money to put towards publishing new novels. Is it kind of crass and incredibly commercialistic? You bet it is. But you don’t have to read it, and it will put a pump a lot of money into an industry that is struggling to stay afloat.
I’ll be honest, I wanted to do a blog entry remembering John Updike the minute I heard of his passing. I'm going to see "The Witches of Eastwick" musical in a little while. The only problem is that I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out how it relates to ghost writing, so I can work it in!
Then I remembered the episode of The Simpsons wherein John Updike had ghost written a book for Krusty the Clown, entitled Your Shoe’s too Big to Kickbox God, so there you go, I can make this relevant to the subject at hand!
I think it goes to show how respected you really are in the literary community when The Simpsons can get a few laughs out of the mere idea that you would ghost write a twenty page book as a money making scam for a washed up TV clown. It’s not so much the book that’s funny, but the idea that it would be written by somebody as high profile and as successful as John Updike.
I won’t say who, but sometimes I read about this or that author getting all kinds of kudos in the literary world and I just think “Really?” Maybe one of the most disappointing experiences for a reader is hearing all this great talk about a certain book or writer, and when you finally get around to checking it out, you just have to wonder what all the fuss was about. John Updike, on the other hand, is one of those authors who deserves every word of praise he’s received.
What might be most impressive about Updike is the simple fact that he remained highly prolific throughout his entire career. Since his debut in the late fifties, he’s put something out almost every single year, and in fact, even earlier this year, 2009, he released a collection of short stories. So many writers put out a popular book or two and retire to the Bahamas, it was comforting to know that Updike always had something new to share with us.
If you haven’t yet, pick up a copy of The Centaur or The Witches of Eastwick, if nothing else, you’ll at least find yourself with a good page-turner.
All kinds of people need ghost writing work done, from plumbing companies who want to set up a website but can’t really write for much, to TV producers who need a press release for their new show. So, for us UK ghostwriters, there are fun jobs, and then there are boring jobs. We dutifully write whatever our clients ask, and while it does essentially boil down to a regular old nine to five, sometimes you stumble upon a job so fun you’d probably be willing to do it for free.
I think this job falls in line that.
It’s too bad this isn’t the kind of job that usually gets farmed out to us career writers, rather, it was handled in-house by Veronica McGregor, former field producer and current employee of a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But wow, can you imagine getting an email about a job like that? “We want you to write a blog from the perspective of our space-robot!” Maybe we should form a union just to make sure we get all the fun jobs!
What I’m liking is the casual, goofy internet chat tone the writer took. Something about the Mars Phoenix posting “Ice on Mars! Woot woot!” on their Twitter account is just plain endearing. It makes sense, in a way. The average space-bot usually lasts about five years, so one human year is about twenty robot years. That would make the Phoenix roughly teen aged. Let’s also consider that communicating with its friends on earth via text message takes up thousands of dollars, also like a teenager!
You know, besides being kind of adorable, this is just a good idea, anyways. Since the end of the Space Race, public interest in space exploration has pretty much been slipping. If nothing else, the idea of a ghost written blog documenting the robot’s discoveries did wind up with about thirty thousand regular readers (heck, that’s a lot better than even a lot of human celebrities do with a blog), even if it won’t quite match the awe of the Moon landing.
Celebrity golden couple and ghostwriters? Not directly connected unless they lose their litigation!
You know, of all the usual targets for the gossip hounds and paparazzi, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are probably at the top of the list, as well as the hardest to get any dirt on. They’ve always been a very private couple, and most of what we see in the celebrity gossip magazines has amounted to little more than speculation on the part of the writer, or through-the-grapevine rumours credited to “unnamed and not always reliable sources”.
So with that in mind, this is slightly more exciting for celeb gossip junkies than your usual tell all book. Apparently, Mickey Brett, former bodyguard to Angelina Jolie is hoping to make a few bucks and maybe earn himself some notoriety with a no holds barred expose on one of the hottest couples in showbiz.
I hope this pans out for him, because he’s probably not getting another celebrity bodyguard gig anytime soon, and in times like these I don’t like to see anyone out of a job!
If you don’t think this book is going to sell by the boatload, you’re crazy. I can guarantee that every gossip lover in the world is going to have a copy, and so will a number of their fans who have never even touched a gossip rag. Heck, I might even take a peek myself, if only to see how someone so close to the family as to have been nicknamed “Uncle Mickey” by little Maddox got jilted and now wants to spill the beans for all the world to see.
If you consider that he’s hiring ghostwriter Robin McGibbon for the actual scribing of the book and is himself not likely to take up a job as a novelist after this, well, let’s just hope he invests his earnings wisely, because there’s not much work in Hollywood when you’re a bodyguard who sells his client’s secrets, and you didn’t write the tell-all book yourself.
Of course, who am I kidding? I’d bet the farm that this book will set Mickey Brett up for life on the first week sales alone. Note to self: If I ever work for someone famous (apart from as a ghostwriter that is of course), do not sign a confidentiality agreement!
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It may not seem like the most obvious topic for a UK ghostwriter to address, but trying not to talk about the new American presidential inauguration right now would be like trying not to talk about the elephant in the room. Who’s going to read about whether or not Britney Spears had a ghostwriter for her blog a day or two after one of the most important events in modern political history?
I think just about anyone who owns a TV set is pretty happy that the American Presidential election year is finally over (at least we in the UK didn’t have to watch a dozen attack ads for every commercial break), but it’s hard to pretend that the events that took place at the end of election night and on the day of inauguration weren’t emotionally involving. From John McCain’s graceful concession speech to Obama’s swearing in, it really has been rewarding to watch.
But I’ll be completely honest, maybe my favourite moment of the night of the inauguration was when America’s new President had the traditional dance with the first lady, and we saw him make a clumsy attempt at a ballroom style spin while Michelle rolled her eyes as she reluctantly went along with it. It was such a nice, human moment, and a welcome change from all the cold blank stares and vacant smiles you get from so many politicians and their spouses. It should be fun seeing an American first lady with a sense of humour for the next four or eight years.
The coming years should be very interesting for all of us. Whether you liked him or didn’t like him, George W. Bush proved a very important fact over the last eight years: a powerful country’s foreign and economic policies affect everyone.
I’ll leave it to you to say whether or not we’re more safe or less safe from terrorist attacks, but you know, there’s one point that you can’t really argue against: The global economy is a mess.
Some would say that you can’t lay all of that at George W. Bush’s feet, but regardless of who you blame, the fact is that the US National Debt more than doubled over the last eight years, and as anyone can tell you, a country as big as the US doesn’t suffer alone. So again, while you may or may not blame it all on you-know-who, I think it’s safe to say that a lot of us are crossing our fingers and hoping that the new American President will bring some positive change.
I will say that I’ve been almost impressed with how Bush handled himself in his final days in office (the words "impressed" and "Bush" not really belonging in the same sentence as far as I can tell). His parting press conference, while a bit combative at times, was overall very graceful, conceding that the whole “Mission Accomplished” debacle was a little off the mark, and finally admitting that Iraq didn’t have any “nucular weapons”. His farewell speech was equally elegant, a bit nostalgic, and most of all, it seemed more sincere than any speech I’ve watched him deliver before. You don’t have to agree with any of his policies, but maybe we did misunderestimate him.
As for the task Barack Obama has ahead of him, well, it won’t be an overnight fix, but still, for anyone who took the time to watch, it was hard not to get a little wrapped up in the positive, hopeful feelings that were on display in the inauguration ceremonies. A major era in world history is closing and a new one is beginning. I think 2009 is going to be an exciting year.
I don’t want to keep writing about the medical ghostwriting controversy, but it won’t go away anytime soon. Every time I go Googling for some interesting news on ghostwriting, I always come up with about fifty reports like this one.
If you don’t feel like reading all of that, the long and short of it is that a ghostwritten article was released a few years ago pushing a drug released by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, and the drug actually put its users at risk for further health complications, so now Wyeth is under investigation.
So this story is a bit different, at least, in that it’s not simply the fear that ghostwritten articles might allow pharmaceutical companies to promote unsafe drugs, but that this article actually did contain false information. The vast majority of medical ghostwriters do produce factual reports based on real scientific findings, but you know, there’s always that one kid who spoils it for everyone else in the class.
Let’s consider one question, though, before we condemn DesignWrite, the writing firm who produced the work: Did they know that the drugs were dangerous, or that they were being asked to write false reports?
If the answer is no, then we really should be talking a little less about the fact that the article was ghostwritten, and a little more about the fact that Wyeth Pharmaceuticals endorses this kind of marketing practice. The officials have it right, as they’re investigating the pharmaceutical company, and they’re leaving DesignWrite out of it. Why can’t the media do the same?
Did we get mad at the guy who designed Enron’s corporate logo when their wrongdoings were uncovered? Do we blame the voiceover guy on the movie trailers if we see a lousy film? For the pharmacies, a ghost writer is, most of the time, simply an advertiser, and it is the drug maker’s moral responsibility to provide the writers with thorough, factual information on the drug in question.
It’s unfortunate that stories like these seem to be the most predominant when it comes to the media’s portrayal of American and UK ghostwriters. Like in any field, there is ethical and unethical ghost writing. I can’t imagine the angry reply I’d get if I ever asked one of my writers to knowingly promote a harmful drug.
The misconception of ghostwriters as the “any dirty job that pays” breed of the scribing trade seems to come from the anonymity we enjoy. As if the attitude is “my name isn’t on it, so I don’t have to worry what it says”. The fact is though, that at the end of the day, we do have to answer at least to ourselves. There are enough agreeable clients out there that there’s really no incentive for any writer to compromise his or her own morals just to pay the rent.
Any professional at any skill level in any field is going to look at the handiwork of other professionals in that field to see how we match up, to learn new tricks, or just to feel better about ourselves by looking at poor craftsmanship! The problem for us UK ghostwriters is that we don’t know where to look!
Every novelist is going to be reading Hemingway and Dickens to see how they measure up, every architect will observe the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, and for us ghosts, we have [NAME WITHELD], [NAME WITHELD], and [NAME WITHELD], who shot to international anonymity with books like [TITLE WITHELD].
So I was thinking about listing some good, ghostwritten new releases as recommendations for my fellow ghosts, but then I thought... if you want to take a look at what best-seller ghostwriting looks like, go ahead and just grab a best-seller.
I mean, you’ve probably seen V.C Andrews; in the new releases section of the bookstore, right? Well, she actually died at age 63 in 1986, so how is she still putting out popular romance novels thirteen years after her death? If she were still writing them herself, that would give a whole new meaning to the term ‘ghostwriting’.
Just about every celebrity biography I can think of is ghost written, unless it was written with a credited partner. Turn on the TV. You’re going to see a lot of television commercials scripted by ghosts, and TV shows with about three or four credited writers, and about two dozen uncredited. Even popular novelists and screenwriters have done anonymous touch ups for one another’s works.
For example, Alfred Hitchcock's A Life In Darkness and Light is considered required viewing for aspiring screenwriters, right? Much of what Hollywood writers use today comes from the way Alfred Hitchcock would structure his scenes. But his writing process was really about 20% Alfie and 80% ghosts. He would gather all his writer friends together, tell them the basic plot of the movie, the characters, and have everyone throwing ideas around. The great Dorothy Parker was one of his favourite uncredited collaborators.
So we’ve listed some examples if you want to see what good ghostwriting looks like, but honestly, I think good ghostwriting is simply the same thing as good writing. You need to know your P’s and Q’s when it comes to spelling, grammar, and punctuation, and you need to know how to craft text that reads well and that makes sense. The one key difference is the audience. When you’re writing under your own name, you are your biggest fan and your harshest critic. When you’re writing for a client, the client is your biggest fan, and definitely your harshest critic!
“Ghost-rapper” is a real job?
One of the upsides to being a UK ghostwriter is that, sooner or later, professionals in every industry are going to require your services. From biographies to celebrity blogs to song lyrics, writing is a skill that needs to be put to use in every profession, but not every professional has spent years honing their skills as a writer, so, if you can write, there will always be somebody out there wanting to pay you to do just that.
The downside is that controversy follows a ghost writer wherever he or she goes.
One of the last fields to finally have its security breached by us dastardly ghostwriters: Hip hop music.
Ghostwritten lyrics are nothing new, and you know, come on, it’s not a big deal. Some of the best performers are people who take songs written by other people and make them their own, and if they’re not borrowing the lyrics, they’re borrowing the music. Ghost writing has long been a great way for aspiring young songwriters to get a foothold in an industry that isn’t the easiest to break into.
Funny enough, it’s not the lyrics this time, but the blogs that have some fans outraged this time. Apparently Kanye West, the guy who releases at least one album a year, while writing the music and guest rapping for other artists, touring constantly, directing his own videos, and designing a line of clothing, somehow, he’s just too busy to write several blog entries a day.
If you ask me, they made a couple of silly mistakes in maintaining this blog. Namely, after Kanye West’s very well publicized arrest earlier this year, his ghost blogger was still making posts under Kanye’s name while West was in police custody.
...Y’know, if you want to maintain the illusion, it’s a pretty elementary concept that you go ahead and skip a couple days when your employer is in jail, but hey, like I said, the hip hop community is still kind of new to this whole ghostwriting thing.
What people tend to forget is that, ghostwritten or not, an artist’s blog still does what it’s supposed to do. It keeps you updated on developments in their career, when the new album is coming out, things like that. An ethical ghost writer isn’t going to lie or make things up in a blog, and an ethical employer isn’t going to slap it up on the internet without knowing the entry is comprised of factual content.
But you know, with Kanye West’s trademark habit of blurting out whatever pops into his head, sparking controversy and alienating fans whenever someone puts him in front of a camera, maybe we should be thanking him for filtering his statements through a ghost writer before putting them online.
2008 wasn’t the greatest year for a lot of people. The economy has been a mess, and this UK ghostwriter has gotten sick and tired of hearing about nothing but the race for the White House.
So I figure it’s about time for a “2008 in Review” that doesn’t even mention the American presidential - whoops, too late. Okay, from this point on, we’ll look at 2008 in ghostwriting, and you won’t see a single mention of any American politician. These aren’t necessarily the biggest ghostwriting stories of the year, but rather, what I found to be some of the most interesting ones.
Medical Ghostwriting Scandals
We reported on this earlier this year, but as you can see it’s an ongoing battle.
This is one area where you can kind of understand why people are so up in arms about the “have word processor, will travel” approach to writing. But the thing is, if a bogus report is published in a major medical journal, it’s not because a doctor hired a ghostwriter without telling him or her what to type. Rather, a bogus report is always going to be a sneaky and unscrupulous PR move on the part of a pharmaceutical company. In which case, it seems obvious that the real problem is the unethical pharmaceutical employee who commissioned the report. Whether or not he wrote every word of it himself really doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.
Bobby Brown Attempts to Block his own Autobiography
Normally, this would just be more unimportant celeb-gossip, but this story actually brings up some interesting arguments regarding ghostwriting ethics and rights. See, Bobby Brown actually commissioned the work, but later changed his mind, after the majority of the work had already been done because, as it turns out, Bobby Brown really DOESN’T want the tell all story of his life out there.
The writer, Derrick Handspike, wound up releasing the book under his own name as an unauthorized biography. If this were a book on car repair, there’d be absolutely no question that the writer has every write to claim it as his own once the client backed out. But... it being such a personal work, how much say should Brown have in its release? Bobby Brown is a public figure, so Handspike is free to release the book, but from an ethical perspective, this is a fairly complex case.
Ghostwriters to get their own Movie Hero
Police officers get Dirty Harry, college professors get Indiana Jones, and now, we finally get our own silver screen superhero In December, it was announced that 2009 would see the political-intrigue novel The Ghost being adapted for the big screen with Ewan McGregor starring as the UK ghostwriter hired to pen the Prime Minister’s memoirs. I’ll be completely honest; most of us ghost writers do the majority of our work wrapped in a blanket with a cup of coffee or tea at our side, so it’s no wonder it’s taken Hollywood so long to try and make a thrilling suspense yarn about the trade, but in all fairness, how many college professors carry a whip?
Pierce Brosnan will be playing the Tony Blair inspired PM. Ha! If only our politicians were as good looking in real life as they are in the movies. That ranks alongside Josh Brolin as George W. But- whoops! I promised not to talk about that!
Oh boy, more ghostwriting outrage.
The complaint about this one is that Britney Spears is having her PR people update her blog for her rather than doing it herself. A few seem to actually be written by the pop star herself, but the majority are by assistants and other members of her staff. Now, the worry is that this is somehow preventing the blog from getting up close and personal. Apparently the world DOES want a ghostwritng pop tart...
But you know, Twitter has a character limit of, what, about 140 letters? How up close and personal do you think anybody’s going to get in 140 characters? There are people in this world with first names longer than 140 characters!
Basically, the blog gets the job done. You get up-to-date info on what’s going on with the new video shoots, recording sessions, and whatever else it is that Spears’ fans are into.
Maybe it’s just the whole starstruck, talking-to-celebrities thing. Britney’s readers want to have the honour of chatting with her online. You know, that’s not what a 140 character blog is really for, though. And what’s the chance she’d have the time to personally reply to all of those comments anyways? I mean, the magician Penn Jillette has a video blog on Youtube. Jillette’s fans aren’t nearly as obsessive as any random pop star’s fans, and even he doesn’t have time to read every comment, let alone reply to them.
I’d be lying if I told you I was the world’s biggest Britney Spears fan or anything (honestly, I’m just a bit surprised she still has such a dedicated fan base), but I suppose I can’t help but feel a bit of sympathy for anyone suffering from the celebrity obsession that has people camping out on your front lawn and begging for photos and autographs every time you step outside. Turning on her over something as simple as having an assistant update her fans, well, it kind of borders on “caring just a bit too much”.
But then, on the other hand, what do you expect? If you hang out at the trendy clubs where you already know there are going to be about two hundred pappers waiting (and let’s not even get into “wardrobe malfunctions”), well... fame comes with a price.
Something that’s been floating around lately is the revelation that many of Tom Clancy’s books have actually been ghost written.
Some readers and writers are up in arms about this. They’re really - as usual - making a mountain out of a molehill.
Tom Clancy’s books are basically just some well crafted, tense pot-boilers. This isn’t fine art we’re talking about here. Clancy is a military buff who puts his knowledge of the field to work, creating entertaining yarns.
It’s probably a safe bet that the vast majority of his fans don’t really care whether Clancy programmed those “Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six” video games all by himself, or if he lends his name to the spin-off series that follows his characters beyond their initial appearances.
The fact is, Tom Clancy does oversee these works, he doesn’t just throw his name out into the public domain. He has some degree of creative control, and if he doesn’t like a book with his name on it, it won’t go to print.
People who read Tom Clancy aren’t so much intrigued by his unique vision, by his style and prose, rather, they want to read a fast paced, tense, action packed stories about secret agents, camouflaged commandos, and secret service guys wearing grey suits and yelling into walkie-talkies.
Now, that genre of fiction is more or less synonymous with Tom Clancy’s name. The ghostwriters are thanked in the headnotes, and to be frank, they’re probably glad to have the opportunity. It’s not easy to get a book published, and it’s even less easy to get anyone to buy your book. In fact, most first novels are lucky to find a thousand readers. Tom Clancy’s name on those books guarantees readers, and it is honest advertising; these books have the exact same subject matter Clancy’s fans have come to expect, and they’re about as well crafted.
Really, ghost writing for a “name” author like Tom Clancy can work wonders for the ghoster’s career. Even if it’s considered bad form for a ghost writer to come out in public and say “Hey to heck with Clancy, I wrote that!” a ghostwriter is, of course, allowed to mention it on their resume, and more than a few ghostwriters have found literary agents and, eventually, success on their own terms thanks to their experience writing an entry or two in a ghostwritten book series.
What a lot of people might not know is that most of Alfred Hitchcock’s films employed a number of unnamed writers. You might react in shock, until you hear that those unnamed writers were close friends of his, and included celebrated authors like Dorothy Parker. Basically, if you were a writer, and a friend of Hitchcock’s, he’d ask you to contribute something. The fact is, as long you’re on the same page as your ghost writer or co-writers, authorship becomes practically irrelevant when crafting entertaining fiction. As long as it’s fun to read, as long as it’s an entertaining story, the vast majority of the audience just plain isn’t going to care.
The ghost writing industry has lost a friend. As you may or may not have heard, Michael Crichton passed away just a few days ago on November 4th of cancer, at the age of sixty six.
What you know about him is that he wrote Jurassic Park… and maybe you have a few vague memories of Congo as well. Say what you will about his writing, but the fact is, he was able to entertain. Michael Crichton produced stories that people liked, and whether or not you can call it high literature, nobody can say he wasn’t a prolific and fun writer.
It may seem weird to connect him to ghost writing, but what you may not remember is that he created the television series ER. While he was credited as a writer on the show in the show credits (which most people don’t even look at anyway), he did have his name on the title screen. BUT (drumroll….) the number of episodes he actually sat down and wrote amounts to, roughly, somewhere in the area of… zero.
His work on the creative end was primarily in coming up with the characters and story ideas to run through each season. These were then handed off to a team of writers, including the writers listed in the credits, as well as a number of ghost writers.
Now, any TV show script has to satisfy finicky actors, marketing-minded producers, several directors, and pushy talent scouts before it’s even allowed into pre-production. So when you consider the vast number of revisions a script goes through before it finally reaches shooting stage… let’s just say that ER employs a lot of ghostwriters.
Crichton’s primary tasks on the show were about the same as any creator of a TV series: attending five hundred meetings a day, every single day. Most creators of TV shows neither write, direct, or star in their own work (with some exceptions like Ray Bradbury Theatre, or Seinfeld). Any long running, successful TV show is going to (eventually) employ some ghost writers along the way. The work of producing a TV series is simply too demanding a job.
If you look at the series, though, it’s surprisingly focused when you consider how many different writers have handled it over a whopping fifteen seasons. It is very much Michael Crichton’s story, and well informed by his background as a doctor. If nothing else, it goes to show how personal even a ghost-written story can be.
ER will retire in early 2009 for good – at least that’s what they are currently saying. Crichton will be missed on the show about as much as George Clooney – which is a LOT!
Sad isn't it? Every man and his dog is talking about The Ayers/Obama Ghostwriting story. So it seems kind of remiss of me to not even mention it.
Many of us did things in college that we aren’t too proud of. Maybe we indulged in excessive partying, or wasted loads of our parent’s money, or maybe we joined a radical leftist political group and pushed other members towards militance, like Bill Ayers.
Bill Ayers made a name for himself in the 1960’s by planting homemade bombs at the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam war. It should be pointed out, the bomb didn’t claim a single casualty, nor even an injury. It did do tens of thousands of dollars in damage. Ayers has since admitted embarrassment and regret for his actions. What Ayers did technically qualifies as terrorism, and it’s not the kind of thing most sane people would approve of, but if you stack Ayers up against Timothy McVeigh or Osama bin Laden, Ayers seems to have been more like a petulant vandal than an honest to goodness terrorist.
So what brings Ayer’s name up here and now, forty years after the fact?
Well, there’s a rumor floating around that Bill Ayers may have been one of the ghost writers for Barack Obama's Dreams of my Father, a memoir focusing on the Senator’s father.
Now, if you know what an ethical American or UK ghost writer does, you’re probably in the “so what?” camp on this issue. An ethical ghost writer isn’t quite the same thing as an “author”. An ethical ghost writer doesn’t just si t down and type up whatever they feel like at the time, rather, they write according to the client’s request and guidelines. IF Ayers wrote the book in the first place, then as long as Ayer’s followed the ghostwriter’s code, there’s really no reason to bat an eyelash at his radical past, because it wouldn’t play any part in his writing gig.
When you consider that the book-on-tape version of the memoirs netted Obama a Grammy, it seems obvious that whoever wrote the memoirs must have done a bang-up - would that we could have done half as good a job on every ghostwriting book project we've done this year.
Honestly, you can probably chalk this rumor up to it being an election year in the US. Both parties are scrambling to find every possible chink in the other’s armor and blow everything out of proportion. For example, do you think it’s a huge deal that, eight years ago, two or three people on McCain’s staff suspected that he might have possibly been having an affair? No hard evidence, no confessions, no eyewitness accounts, just sort of a hunch. Well the Democratic bloggers are all over that rumor, just as the Republican voters are all over this Bill Ayers rumors.
The moral of the story: If you want to run for president or prime minister, clean up all of your mole hills before somebody turns them into mountains.
We’ve heard all about celebrities releasing tell-all autobiographies through ghostwriters, but this, my friends, is a new low! Even those of us in the ghostwriting business should be shocked.
"Me Cheeta", the alleged “autobiography” of Cheeta, chimp star of dozens of Tarzan films, is full of stories of the ape’s career in Hollywood . And this particular tell-all book pulls no punches, fully disclosing his abduction from the jungles of Africa , his addiction to alcohol and cigars, and even his battle with diabetes. It really is an intriguing story.
Animal performers weren’t always very well treated in early 20th Century Hollywood, and it wasn’t at all uncommon for them to be fed unhealthy diets, fed drugs to affect their mood for the cameras, to be made to work long hours and so on. The book even details Cheeta’s relationship with his son, Jeeta, who makes a living as a nightclub performer.
Sounds like a great read, right? Well, as reliable sources would have it, the entire text of this tome was one hundred percent ghostwritten!
That’s right, the famous ape performer did not place a single word on the page by his own hand! What’s more, our sources tell us that Cheeta never so much as read the book to ensure its accuracy! Rather, his talent agent merely contracted a few people to research Cheeta’s history and write the book for him. Talk about a hands-off autobiography! At the very least, we as ghostwriters can expect celebrities to read their books before they go to print, and to (at the very least) provide an interview to the author. Not Cheeta, though! Apparently, fame has just gone plain gone to this ape’s head, and he can’t be bothered to take an active role in his own autobiography!
We've all heard the gag that if you put another chimps to work typing, statistically one of them would eventually write the Complete Works of Shakespeare (not that one ever has) but to put it another way, if you put enough ghostwriters on the market, one of them will pick up a project that beggars belief. I can feel a whole new genre coming on... if any prospective clients would like to contact me, we would be VERY interested in ghostwriting the memoirs of (in no particular order):
- Flipper
- Skippy
- Lassie
- Trigger
- Willy (the whale, not an XXX project)
- Red Rum
- Mr Ed
- Clarence the Lion
- Dolly the Cloned sheep (or any of the other Dolly Sisters)
- Silver (as in Heigh Ho Silver!)
- Donner, Blitzen or any other reindeer clients (yes we'll be available in the quieter summer months)
Now I know what you’re saying: How can anyone expect a chimpanzee to write his own autobiography without opposable thumbs?
I point you to "KOKO-LOVE", a book comprised of interviews with Koko, the famous sign-languaging gorilla. If nothing else, “KOKO-LOVE!” should be able to prove that a non-human ape can be perfectly articulate and well spoken without the aid of a ghostwriter.
