THE FINE ART OF COLLABORATION: Excerpt From My Book: A Friendly Guide to Writing and Ghostwriting

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.

                                                                        - - - Helen Keller

It takes a particular kind of person to be a celebrity ghostwriter, someone who is willing to override their personal opinions and preferences and take up someone else’s. You will be required to conduct interviews, transcribe tapes, create a structure and write a book according to another person’s vision, no matter if you agree with them or not. These are all challenging, but for me, the hardest part of ghostwriting is working my butt off and then stepping back while someone else steps forward to take the credit. I had to work hard on that.

The documentary, Twenty Feet From Stardom, 2013, describes the lives and careers of backup singers who support a major star. They are not recognized as luminaries in their own right since they stand behind the star or off to the side, providing harmonies to the lead vocalist’s melodies. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t as talented. Maybe they’re shy by nature and feel more comfortable in the background. Maybe they have talent but they lack that certain something, the charisma and self-confidence required to be a headliner. Maybe they don’t know the right people to catapult them into the spotlight. Or maybe it’s just plain luck that elevates one person over another, shining a light on the front man and turning someone else into a ghost.

I became a different kind of ghost for the first time when I was sixteen, traveling with my ballet company. Our salaries were meager (ballerinas aren’t in it for the money) and when we were doing one-night-stand tours throughout the United States, sometimes for ten consecutive weeks, we came up with a way to save money on hotel rooms. When we arrived at the current godforsaken Bates Motel or Holiday Inn (if it's Tuesday, this must be Muskogee, Oklahoma), one person would check in at the front desk and the roommate would sneak up in the elevator to share the room and the cost.

We called it “ghosting” for obvious reasons. If the bed was a double, we slept side by side. If it was a twin, we put the mattress on the floor where one of us slept, while the other one tried to settle in for the night on the box springs. We alternated who checked in and who trailed behind (the ghost), who got the mattress and who didn’t. We repeated this night after night, sharing rooms clandestinely and aching from sleeping on box springs. The various hotel receptionists must have noticed that forty people got off the bus and only twenty checked in, but they never questioned us. I guess they liked having a ballet company from the big city staying in their grimy establishments.

In the end, however, a ghost is a ghost. In 1990, more than twenty years after I retired from my ballet career, I got my first ghostwriting job. I didn’t ask for it. Who ever asked a child what they wanted to be when they grew up and got the answer, “I want to write books and have someone else get the credit.” But that was what had happened to me.

It never crossed my mind to ghostwrite until a friend, a champion gymnast, asked me to help him finish his book. He had a publishing deal, he had written about eighty scattered pages, and he was way past his deadline when I agreed to work with him. I was a logical choice. I knew him. I'd already had my first book, Awakening the Healer Within, published by Simon & Schuster, and I’d been an athlete. Still, I was anxious when I arrived at his home to begin our work together. I didn't feel up to the task. What the hell did I know about collaborating?

When I thought about it, however, I realized that I’d been collaborating all my life: playing Double Dutch jump rope at school; maneuvering difficult relationships; tolerating complicated family gatherings and being a cog in the wheel of a company of forty dancers. These things had all required compromise so I threw myself into the project and figured it out as I went along;

There are various kinds of collaboration. Some of them allow equal participation from both parties but celebrity ghostwriting is different. You’re not sharing the work equally with someone else. The celebrity gives you the information and you write the book. As I worked on book after book, there were times when I wondered if I was engaged in something clandestine. Was it cheating? I checked the bestseller lists and realized that at least half of the books had been written by someone else so I carried on. I saw that I was creating something wonderful and it didn’t matter who had written it.

It tested my mettle. I had to figure out when to encourage and when to let go, even when I knew I was right. I had to figure out when to speak up and when to stay quiet and that changed from day to day. The fine art of collaboration is not stagnant. It’s dynamic, changing from moment, and it requires constant awareness. It can unnerve you and push you to your limits, but it also teaches you to how to manage tough situations, stay neutral during disagreements, think on your feet, be mindful of where you are in the process, pull material out of thin air, and hit those deadlines. And exercise humility. When you put in the work required and end up with a good product, you’ll feel like you achieved the impossible and you can look forward to more work coming down the pike.