How I Became a Ghostwriter
A few years ago, I read a New Yorker article by J.R. Moehringer, thought to be the highest-paid ghostwriter of all time. (He reportedly landed a million-dollar fee for Prince Harry’s autobiography Spare.) In the article, Moehringer says ghostwriting is a profession to which no one actually aspires. He quips, “You never hear a kid say, “One day, I want to write other people’s books.”
I laughed out loud when I read that line—because it’s true.
I never wanted to be a ghostwriter when I grew up. In fact, I never wanted to be a writer at all. It just happened. But looking back, I can see the antecedents.
My career began at age three when I dictated stories to my mom, then created custom illustrations. (Okay they were scribbles.) A few years later, I started exploring the woods behind our house with the dog, adventures which I mentally narrated in real time (in the third-person, oddly.) Around age eleven I saved up for a mini tape recorder—incredibly cool technology at the time—which I used to make covert field recordings and write exposés about my family in spiral notebooks. (I’ve since moved beyond sensationalism and guerrilla tactics.) I loved writing because it gave me a voice where otherwise I often felt shutdown and powerless.
My high school journalism teacher gave me a D on my first assignment, but by senior year I was winning regional journalism competitions. Then I discovered zines—those DIY cut ‘n’ paste publications of the 90s which we used to distribute via snail mail—and my life was revolutionized. Complete freedom of expression in words and images, reproduced for pennies on the dollar and handed out to loyal fans! To this day self-publishing is my heartstring.
During college I got a second job in response to a weekly newspaper ad which said, “If you like talking to people and have at least basic writing skills, you could be a reporter for the Sequim Gazette!” My illustrious life as a pro writer took off from there. When I moved to South Carolina later that year, I continued freelancing for local publications, and that allowed me to piece together a living doing something which felt both adventurous and meaningful. Though it hasn’t been easy, I’m proud to have made it on my own as a freelancer all this time.
After fifteen years of writing under my own byline, what would compel me to start ghosting? Well, probably the same thing that lures most ghostwriters: someone asked me to create blog posts in his voice, and that was the beginning of a new chapter. A few years later I was ghostwriting full-length books, and today I specialize in memoir and mission-driven nonfiction.
So no, I didn’t aspire to this. Yet it’s a great career which allows me to earn my living while getting thoroughly schooled by experts on life-changing subjects which enrich me far beyond the paycheck. Perhaps the next generation of schoolchildren might grow up saying they want to be ghostwriters after all.
