Giving Up the Ghost

"On any given week, up to half of any nonfiction best-seller list is written by someone other than the name on the book," declared a 1997 New York Times piece that examined the growing presence of ghostwritten books in the publishing world. "Add those authors who feel enough latent uneasiness to bury the writer's name in the acknowledgements and the percentage, according to one agent, reaches as high as 80."

Sadly, very few of them are worth reading, including many of those I'd had a hand in producing.

Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field, on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us--so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe."

Cocktail party material aside, somewhere along, the way, I lost my way. When I started I told myself that ghostwriting was as good a training ground for a novelist as most any other kind of writing, that someday I would resurrect my unpublished novel and be equipped, at long last, with the necessary skills to fix it. That by studying others' voices I would learn how to shape and refine my own. This was the crux of my John Hopkins voice class. Learning to modulate, even appropriate another's voice was useful, I instructed. Yet after a while, I warned my students, ghostwriting becomes an exercise in ventriloquism and nothing much else.

THE WRITER'S CHRONICLE (Volume 35, Number 1) from "Giving Up the Ghost" by Barbara Feinman Todd