The ghost writer

I saw a trailer for new cinematic experience The Ghost Writer recently, and boy did it look exciting. There were suspense, danger, nice suits, private jets, horn-rimmed spectacles, and good looking women. Dictaphones. Typewriters. Cigarettes burning low in long-forgotten ashtrays.

Occasionally someone held a sheaf of paper -- presumably it contained the thousands of words the ghost writer had already penned, and was momentarily sending to the publisher. The entire cast seemed perpetually poised on the dual brinks of literary fame and dramatic death, undoubtedly at the hands of a bespectacled man or a good looking woman. Or a private jet.

In my experience, ghost writing is less death and more deadline-related drama. Less glory and more grunt.

The ghost writer is akin to the elephant carrying the litter of the gold-silk-draped prince. The author-prince decides the direction; the elephant gets him there. The author-prince becomes distracted eating a pomegranate; the elephant fords a muddy torrent rather than being allowed to take the bridge that's just upstream. At the journey's end, the author-prince calls for lute players and virgins and virginal lute players, and prepares for the attention of the court; the elephant gets a long-awaited bath in the muddy torrent.

In short, ghost writing is like building any product for any brand. What I do is just like what you do. The only difference between a book and a shoe design, or an advertisement, or a piece of software, or a boat is that a book is usually attached to a name, and the laws of copyright have ensured that the public usually expects the name of the author to be the name of the person who put the actual words on the paper (or screen, if you're so inclined).

But this is the information age, kids. The era of personal branding and big ideas. And even if you lock yourself in your library of high-embodied-energy hardbacks and pretend it's 1860, you'll have to admit that unnamed editors have always had a strong hand in the way a book turns out, no matter who put the actual words on the paper in the first draft of the ms. These, alongside the association of private jets with ghost writers, are among the greatest misrepresentations of how content is produced.

The name "ghost writing" seems eminently suitable for such a veiled profession.