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Monday 12th May

The Difference Between Ghostwriting And Fictional Writing - by Andrew Crofts

Posted at 6:01AM Friday 15 Feb 2008

The rules for writing popular books that grip readers on page one and hold their attention to the end are pretty much the same for both fiction and non-fiction. In both cases you are telling a story in as engrossing a way as you can, the only difference being the origin of the material, the fiction originating in your head, the non-fiction in someone else's.

The lines are even more blurred when you ghost people's memoirs and autobiographies for them, as I do most of the time, or write fiction through the eyes of a first person narrator – which I have also just done. In both cases you have a single voice and a single point of view and, if the books are to be satisfying reads, you are looking for a narrative structure that will carry the tale through from beginning to end.

A fictional character is nearly always a patchwork of real people stitched together in the author's imagination to create someone who will, hopefully, seem completely new and individual. If you are ghostwriting for someone who is talking about their own life and experiences, you are basically writing an extended monologue for them, just as you might do if they were a character you had invented in a play or the narrator of a story you had made up.

In a novel which has been successfully written in the first person singular, the narrator will stay in character at all times, seeing the story and the other characters from their point of view. In a ghosted memoir or autobiography you need to achieve the same effect. There will be words that a twenty-year-old pop singer would use, for instance, when talking about his or her life that a sixty-year-old Chinese business tycoon or a Ghurkha Colonel wouldn't. The same adhesion to character is required in both fictional and ghosting disciplines.

To test the characterisation in my latest novel "The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride" I asked an actress to dramatise the first chapter for a film to be floated out on YouTube, (the result of which can be found at www.steffimcbride.com). I reasoned that if the words still sounded convincing when tripping off the tongue of someone who was the right age and gender to be the lead character, then they should hopefully be working on the page as well. With a ghosted book you have the subject themselves there to read bits aloud in order to test whether the words sound authentic.

In some ways a ghosted book is "dictated" to the ghost by the subject. They may require guidance but they are basically holding the story they want to tell in their heads and merely need to have it prised out as painlessly as possible. Likewise, a fictional character like Steffi McBride can dictate the story in her creator's imagination in much the same way. You often hear novelists saying "the book wrote itself", and the same could be said of ghostwriting. Once you know the subject well enough to understand their story and hear their voice telling it inside your head, you are ready to commit it to the screen and on to paper, just like a novelist whose invention has come to fruition inside their imagination and is ready to be released onto a keyboard.

www.steffimcbride.com