Creative writing - From think to ink - Lindstrom Simeon 2015

What about a ghostwriter?

You know, I understand if you have a good, hard look at your life and think to yourself that honestly, you just can’t be bothered. Maybe you really don’t have the time. Maybe you’ve tried to improve but your writing is just atrocious and that’s the end of it. Maybe you hate writing or English is not your first language.

Even still, though, I believe you should write your own work.

Why?

There are ghostwriters out there who are talented, hardworking and just the kind of people who will take your grand ideas and spin them into something special, without all the effort of, you know, writing it out yourself. With enough money, in fact, you could actually just buy yourself a good novel, put your name on it and call it a day.

Many “authors” do this, and if you’re a fan of any famous bloggers, self help writers or other sundry famous folk, there’s a good chance what you read was actually written by a ghostwriter. I’m not about to tell you what I think of the ethics of this (I think it’s fine) and I’m not about to tell you whether you should go for one (you can) but I am going to say one thing.

Ghostwritten work is missing a crucial ingredient. It’s something that you can’t actually pay for, even if you had the money. It’s not something you can describe to a freelancer you’ve never met and tell them to whip it up for you in a few weeks. Throughout this book, we’ve been going round and round this idea of creativity, this beautiful, elusive quality, this thing that makes dead words on a page come alive. I’ve tried to suggest ways you can cultivate this in yourself, ways to coax out this magic in ways that make sense for you, and ways to nurture it when you find it so that your writing is vibrant, human and completely captivating.

Ghostwritten work can be good. It can very good. But it can never capture this magic. Not even close. I’ll be blunt to make my point: in the same way as you wouldn’t expect to find love and romance with a prostitute, you can’t expect to find personal, high quality and unique work merely by paying a ghostwriter.

Now, if the work you are commissioning is merely a how-to book, a compilation or guide, something light and silly, or, I don’t know, a recipe book — it will be less obvious. Here, I would say go ahead and save yourself the trouble by hiring a professional and carrying on with the rest of your life.

But if you have a tender, special idea you’ve been nurturing for a while, yearning to grow it up into a big strapping book that people will read and be moved by — then don’t go for a ghostwriter. They can craft you a convincing replica of what you tell them, sure, but it will lack the soul and punch that a book you wrote yourself would have.

There won’t be the same level of conviction present in a book written by somebody who’s approaching the thing as more of a technical exercise. Your efforts may even be a bit rougher, a little less polished and a little less sophisticated than theirs — but it will be authentic. And readers respond to authenticity.