By Daniel Rigney, as Told to Daniel Rigney
Interviewer: Thank you for joining us here at Open Salon to talk informally about the process of ghostwriting. Rookie ghostwriters and those who can only dream of ghostwriting professionally will be interested to hear your own experiences and your tips for successful ghosting.
Author: I’m happy to be here, as Garrison Keillor used to say.
Interviewer: How did you break into the ghostwriting game originally?
Author: Years ago I worked in a small liberal arts college, and I had the misfortune to be tapped for an administrative position as a presidential assistant. I started by ghostwriting a fund-raising prospectus for potential donors in a multi-million-dollar capital campaign. The president of the university claimed to have written it. He may have written one sentence. I don’t really care. I guess they were paying me for my ghostwriting work as one of my unspoken duties. I often hid in the library to get much of my work done because I knew the president never went there.
Later I wrote a speech for him, so I guess I’ve been a speechwriter or a ghost speechwriter as well, but flying in a much lower circle than the writers who put words in the mouths of U.S. presidents and corporate heads. The fictionalizing of authorship reminds me of a line from the Beatles: “Nothing is real” in strawberry fields. And in today’s corporatized culture, it’s strawberries all the way down. Or so it seems sometimes. I don’t want to be too cynical. I really don’t.
Interview: Neither do I. Please go on.
My capital campaign experience got me interested in public relations or “institutional advancement” writing generally. I love these euphemisms. Capital campaign literature of the sort I wrote, for instance, usually bears phony, self-caricaturing corporate titles like Dedication to Excellence or Quest for Distinction. You never see Quest for Adequacy or Up From Obscurity. A really honest prospectus title would usually be something like We’re Better Than You Might Think, and We Could Be Even Better If You’d Help Us Out. We’ll probably be seeing that one soon, I’m sure.
The real life and truth of an institution is usually somewhere between the poles of heaven and hell. It’s not the Chamber of Commerce version of reality, but it’s not a chamber of horrors either. Catholics used to have a name for this middle ground. I think it's still on the books. They called it Purgatory. Come to think of it, that would be a pretty honest name for a campaign to promote Houston. Not “Purgatory.” I mean “We’re better than you think.”*
Interviewer: Have you done any other ghostwriting?
Author: A little. I was the unacknowledged author of a research report I wrote as a consultant to a social service agency at a local military base. I was compensated. I guess I can live with that. I just wish they had told me ahead of time that I wouldn’t be the author. Otherwise I might never have authored it.
Then there was the time I wrote a fake interview with myself for a university press blog. I was the actual author of a book called The Matthew Effect: How Advantage Begets Further Advantage, and I was later asked to be the fake interviewer who interviewed myself for publicity purposes. I have no problem with this at all. I'm grateful for the opportunity. I got to ask myself what I thought were good questions, and I got to answer them satisfactorily in a short space. I was, in effect, a ghost interviewer, or Geistfrager as the Germans might call it if they had a word for it. The only problem with self-interviewing is that you have to write something in your own name before you can do a fake author’s interview with yourself.
Interviewer: Doesn’t this whole thread of conversation raise complex and vexing questions about postmodern identity? About the nuances of self-interviewing in social and historical context? Aren’t there richly-layered questions here, crying to be heard over the monological din of corporate inscription, about interrogation in general, and about the otherness of the self and the selfness of the other?
Author: I don't know. I guess so, now that you mention it.
Interviewer: What tips would you give to writers or aspiring writers just starting out in the ghostwriting business?
Author: Read your contract several times. Know it. Live it. And keep your head down.
Interviewer: You’re semi-retired now. Is there life after ghostwriting?
Author: That is a very funny question. It works on several levels. You have a real gift for interviewing.
Interviewer: Thank you. So do you.
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For more on ghostwriting from this author, see Danagram’s “Tips for Ghostwriters” in Open Salon, May 27, 2011 at open.salon.com/blog/danagram.
*Dr. Stephen Klineberg of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University has good data to show that people who live in Houston like the city much better than one might expect judging from its external image as a mosquito-ridden mudhole and Confederate enclave. Yes, it’s those things too. But it’s so much more. We were pleasantly surprised when we moved here recently. More later as we continue to develop “Houston: A Newcomer’s Guide for Newcomers.”
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