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 ghostwriter, someone who is willing to override their personal opinions and preferences and take up someone else’s. You’ll be required to conduct interviews, transcribe tapes, create a structure and write a book according to another person’s vision. These are all challenging but perhaps the hardest part is working your butt off and then stepping back while someone else steps forward to take the credit.
The documentary, Twenty Feet From Stardom, 2013, describes the lives and careers of backup singers. They are not recognized as luminaries in their own right since they stand 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 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 on 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 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 heard of a child standing up in the schoolroom and saying, “When I grow up, I want to be a ghostwriter.” It never crossed my mind until a friend, an expert on depression and anxiety, asked me to help her finish her book. She had a publishing deal, she had written about fifty scattered pages, but she was way past her deadline when I agreed to work with her. I was a logical choice since I knew her and I'd already had my first book, Awakening the Healer Within, published with Simon & Schuster. Still, I was anxious when I arrived at her 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 all required compromise so I leveled my shoulders and I strode in, never letting on how scared I was. I turned to my stage experience, acting like I knew what I was doing and figuring everything out as we went along. I learned to listen well and watch for tacit signs that my friend was either enthusiastic or discouraged. I came to anticipate when she was open to my suggestions and when she wasn’t. I learned when to hold back and when to urge her forward with no idea that I was in training to be a ghostwriter.
After she and I had worked together for nearly a year, writing and rewriting, she turned in her book and it hit Number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list in one week. It was thrilling but when I was invited to a party at a prominent producer’s home to celebrate my client’s unparalleled success, it didn't take me long to see what I’d signed on for. My friend strode up to the front of the room and graciously thanked the people who had helped her along the way. She praised her agent, her publisher, expert doctors she had interviewed, editors and her family. She said that she never could have done it without them and she never even glanced in my direction. she had left me out.
Later, when she was working the room, smiling and accepting kudos and adoration, she passed me at the refreshment table and said, “Oh, I should have mentioned you. I forgot. Sorry.”
I left the party feeling devastated. I’d painstakingly analyzed and rewritten every word in this woman’s bestselling book for a year. She had confided her deepest secrets in me, she and I had discussed all of her decisions, I had conducted important interviews with experts and now she expected me to disappear. After all, that was our agreement, and once I was gone, she never called me again. She clearly didn’t want anyone to know she’d had help with her book. Maybe she didn't want to admit it to himself. During her book tour, when she looked in the mirror before a TV talk show appearance, I wondered if she saw me staring back at him like a phantom.
No one could have predicted that her book would remain on the bestseller list for months and go on to sell more than three million copies. I had lost a friendship in the process, but word got around the publishing houses and editors began calling me. Before I had a chance to think about it, I was a sought after ghostwriter and I became fluid in a process that shifted constantly from person to person.