Haunted by Ghostwriting: Richard Flanagan

Truly, ghostwriting is a gift. An ability to inhabit another’s voice and speak as if it were your own.

The fact that the little word “ghost” is attached at the front doesn’t change one fact: This is real writing. Difficult writing. Just like any writing.

When it works best (as in Andre Agassi’s memoir written with the help of JR Moehringer), there are no signs of it. The text feels composed by the autobiographer/memoirist alone. When it doesn’t work so well, as in Richard Flanagan’s case (described in his book First Person), it sounds more like a demonic possession.

There are writers whose best gift is to edit others … there are writers whose best gift is to ghostwrite for others … there are writers whose best gift is their own writing.

Flanagan fits into this last category, obviously, but it is interesting with First Person to realize that, in his early days, the creator of Gould’s Book of Fish and The Narrow Road to the Deep North went down the road of ghostwriting because he desperately needed money.

The book isn't a memoir but, according to various media outlets, a fiction with heaping doses of Flanagan's biography in it.

I met Flanagan years ago after the publication of the novel The Unknown Terrorist, and I had no idea about this part of his life.  He came to L.A. for our big annual book event, and we sat in the corner of the author green room and drank beer smuggled in by his amazing publicist.

I wish I'd known.  I would have asked him how you work with non-writers on their books.  That requires a different muscle--something I've learned to exercise for my own manuscript editing business.  More here.

For Flanagan, based on what First Person gives us, it sounds like the experience was an absolute nightmare.  For $10,000, he was asked to help produce the memoir of a man who was a trickster and shape-shifter.  In light of Flanagan's oeuvre, which often tackles larger-than-life characters with dubious ties to the truth, that experience was obviously beneficial.  Formative, probably.

But for a guy who just wants to feed his family and get on with his own work?  I just can't imagine dealing with that.

I admire practitioners of the ghostwriting trade ... and if you're considering that route, I recommend reading one of Flanagan's other books first.  (That makes sense, doesn't it?) You will learn so much if you do.

Onward, my friends.

Amirite? Has the Digital Age Killed Good Writing?

It doesn't matter if you're posting something only for your friends or advertising your skills to an employer, good writing in the digital age still matters.

Amirite?

(My auto-correct is fighting me on that word.  It keeps telling me that what I really want to say is "emirate.")

BuzzFeed's Emmy Favilla published a book a few years ago that is ... no exaggeration here ... a declaration of war on old grammar rules in the glittering digital age, A World Without 'Whom': The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age.  (Read Tom Rachman's TLS review here.)

I like shorthand speech as much as she does, and I get where she is coming from.  (I don't even mind ending a sentence with a preposition.)  But I can't help rolling my eyes when she says:

"Today everyone is a writer - a bad, unedited, unapologetic writer. There's no hiding our collective incompetence anymore."

It's not that I disagree with her.  I just think we should do a better job of hiding that fact on our personal websites, Facebook posts, other social media platforms, etc.  The world is watching us.  Constantly.  Always.  Once we hit "publish" on a post, our thoughts will continue on -- bad, unedited, unapologetic -- in some weird, cached immortality for as long as the internet exists.

So here's a poetic thought: One day, long after I'm dead and gone, it might be nice for my middle-aged kids to discover some frazzled post I wrote while I was trapped in a midlife crisis.  Maybe it will comfort them.  But I sure don't want any potential employers, readers, and other supporters to find that stuff ... not unless I really want them to.  (Again: I don't mind a dangling preposition now and then.)

That is why we all need to struggle against the easy slide into bad writing online, even though Emmy Favilla does her level best in her book to show us how to embrace it and move on.

Onward, my beloved friends.

Would chopping 400 pages make it a better book?

By page 300 of Hideo Yokoyama's novel Six Four, I was getting weary.  "Where's the editor?" I kept thinking. "Didn't someone have the courage to tell this guy his story isn't working?

The questions of a book critic and a manuscript editor are sometimes the same ones.  It was true as I prepared my review of Yokoyama's big bestseller for the pages of the Los Angeles Review of Books.  You can read my review by going here.

I found myself shifting gears and thinking of Yokoyama's book as I would about my clients. ( To find out about my editing services, visit here for more information.)

The normal reaction of many manuscript editors -- confronted by 500+ pages -- is a simple one:  Cut, cut, cut.   Any novel that crosses the 300-page threshold is liable to sell poorly (that's what some think, at any rate) unless it happens to have been written by J.K. Rowling or E.L. James.

I thought the same way when I first started Six Four, but the deeper I went into Yokoyama's story, the more I realized how essential everything was.  There's a purpose to every page, and it takes time to unfold what he has in mind.  I would have LOVED to have served as his editor and supported him in bringing this portrait of a Japanese police media relations officer to life.  (Obviously he already had that person!)  That's the type of editor you want (if I do say so myself!) for your work -- someone patient enough to wait and look for patterns and meanings.

I won't say more about that novel here, my beloved friends.  I'll instead encourage you to read about it at the LARB, which richly deserves all of our attention and support.

Onward, my friends.

Karma's a critic (in this case)

In another post, recently, I wrote about the virtues of Michiko Kakutani of the NY Times -- her invisibility except where it counted most: in her reviews. But even there, she took books to task on their own terms.  She didn't make it about her.

I used to edit somebody at the L.A. Times who was the opposite of Kakutani in so many ways -- every review was always about him.  He was a mid-level critic with enough chops that my boss kept hiring him out ... and I had to keep dealing with him.

Every phone call to discuss edits was a long, torturous discussion.  Every edit -- even to change an article (which are as neutral, and as trivial, as the stones along a hiking trail) -- required considerations worthy of the Talmudic sages of old.

Ok, fine.  There are plenty of writers like that.  I act that way, too, when my own writing is under the microscope.  Words matter, even the little ones ... but hey, please, just don't subject a poor sub-sub book review editor to such a long talk about it when a shorter one will do, especially when the guy has plenty of other editorial work waiting for him after the phone call is over.

But the thing I absolutely couldn't bear was the self-dramatization in every conversation.  This guy saw his own life in grand, heroic terms  -- and he narrated his latest experiences to me in terms that were just, well, weird.  Here's one example that I've never been able to forget.  You may understand why in a moment.  When I rang him and he answered, I identified myself and asked, benignly, "how's it going?" and his answer was:

Well, you know, spring has come early to New York City.  Everything is blossoming now, and there's this riotous energy in the air that is making me feel sexually restless.  I don't know what to do with it.  Once it awakens, you know, you can't change it.  I'm just feeling very sexual lately.

That's cool, buddy, I'm glad you told me.

At any rate, the guy has gone on to fool several publishers into collecting his musings on various things, and recently a memoir of his was published ... and thoroughly skewered in the pages of the TLS for the same reasons why I never looked forward to calling him to discuss my edits.  His book sounds dreadful.

It's been many many years since I've thought about him, but that review prompted me to recall our editing exchanges -- and it was also nice to think that karma, though it may take a while, always arrives.

Keep going, my dear friends.