Ghostwriting is all about getting your book written by a professional writer – think of It as your words or ideas, my labour. Your name as author on the cover, my name in invisible ink. I frequently chat to people who say they’ve never heard of ghostwriting but it is much more common that you might think. 

You may notice there are periods of time when I don’t really talk much about what work I am doing. These are times where I have contracts in place and I am head down, bum on seat writing.

And I love it.

I love the intensity of these writing projects.

I love that we start a process together with nothing and end up with a manuscript. There is a pride for both parties. Everyone wins… and the world wins because your thoughts have been captured to be shared with a wider audience. 

I get genuinely excited for the clients I work with.

I enjoy that we build a relationship for the time I am in your life, and I get to know my clients in a real way. I always need to get inside a clients’ voice so I can write in a way that reflects their uniqueness, and that is a challenge that I relish.

And the client always gets final say.

Each project is a little different – for some there are source materials and loads of research and interviews to be done. For other clients with a clear picture of what they want to say, or a personal story to tell, I am more like the conduit from verbal story to getting something on the page.  Usually content is nonfiction, memoir/biography – what I love most – but it can be anything.

Often I sign Non Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) so I can never talk about who I write for, but I can say this – most books written by ‘famous people’, most columns written in magazines or on blogs by celebrities will have the hand of a ghostwriter in their production.

And sometimes it’s just that people are busy. Writing is hard work. It requires dedicated hours (yes I’ve turned out 65,000 word manuscripts in 6 months) and a skill set that after years of practice I’ve managed to be proficient at. I’ve studied and I’ve honed my skills over decades. And I can tell you it is possible to be ‘writing fit’  – it takes time but it’s a game changer for productivity!

You may have realised there’s value in outsourcing all sorts of ‘life tasks’ to a professional – book writing is no exception.

Social media’s incitement to celebrate everyone and everything is not the way for me as a solo freelancer

A little while ago, I retired one of my major clients because I wanted to step away from writing work that I knew wasn’t truly satisfying my soul needs and embrace more fully the writing that could. To create the opportunity for this to happen, I needed to first create the space.

So here I sit full of anticipation and delight at what might be, aware that attracting the right type of work is as simple and as complex as showing up and being very clear about what I will and won’t do.

But there is this little voice calling me from afar saying ‘you need to market yourself’ and it is this voice that fills me with revulsion. I can honestly say I hate marketing.

I am a person, complex and wonderful like any other. That, in this phase of my life, now 50 plus and with the sum experience of a 30 plus-year career (ironically much of it in marketing), I need to reduce myself to some sort of commodity that can be marketed is something I am finding very unpalatable.

Social media has done something equally wonderful and terrifying. The way everyday people can build an online persona is a type of freedom I couldn’t have imagined when I first started earning my own living. But this is also the problem. The persona is often another mask designed with the often not so subtle message of ‘pick me, pick me.’ I just can’t go there.

Flowing through my feed are the constructed images of ‘successful’ people telling me how wonderful their method or product is, sharing their ‘secret tactic’, convincing me  their call to action is limited and life changing, and it makes me despair. I take in the dozens of people in my feed alone who promise to share their secret sauce’ if only I register for their webinar RIGHT NOW or who in all their supposed realness do a piece to camera about themselves that is little more than yet another call to action.

I‘m sure I am not the only one whose BS radar is hyperactive.

Self-revelation seems to be the latest marketing tactic (sharing your story is fine but what is the intent?) but it’s not real honesty– it’s designed, it has a goal (usually financial), an expectation attached to it and this I think is at the core of my discomfort. The desired outcome is nothing more than a manipulation.

Build your platform, increase your likes, make videos starring yourself – these are all things we are told we must do to establish or grow our profiles. But what for the people who simply do not wish to turn their life and living into a series of posts? What about women like me who don’t want to be viewed and judged or commented on in such a public space, women (or men for that matter) who simply want to live quietly, with some sense of privacy and dignity about how much of their own personal world is offered to the public arena.

I don’t want to reduce myself to a series of dot points and marketable key points of difference. I don’t want to wake up each morning and have to think about what impressive post I can come up with today to make you all like me, or seek out what I have to offer. I don’t need to feel the adoration of like traffic to let me know I am ok today. I don’t want to treat the people I will write for one day as though those things matter to them, because I honestly believe that beyond the mediated experience of the online environment there are still people like me who value authenticity, not as a marketing touchpoint, but as a way to live held deeply in the heart.

What if we didn’t participate in all this constructed madness and the incessant need to up the ante? I have always said a real product doesn’t need to be marketed.

And I don’t think a real person needs to be either.

A movie made me pack my bags.

La vita e bella, January 1999. I finished one life and started another in less than a month.

I packed two pair of pants, one single breasted black jacket, one broken heart, one pair of black Italian leather boots, one red shirt, three spiral bound notebooks, and one Cesare Pavese poetry book. I barely said goodbye.

I first saw snow on that plane flight – my face pressed against the tiny oval window, the Apennines stretched out below, a wonderland in miniature.

There are two things I remember – I walked everywhere, and I wrote. More than 80,000 words of scratchy lines, blue pen against the brilliant lined white paper, page after page of exploring my inner world, while the outer world filled my heart with beauty.

On the second day in this foreign country, a man approached me. ‘Boungiorno,’ I said hesitantly. He looked familiar to me, a visceral memory from a dream a few nights earlier.

‘Piccola mia,’ he replied and suddenly my broken heart was mended and ready for new adventures.

For the next three months, I was shown la bella vita by Andrea. Quiet tucked away dinners on the foreshore of Lago di Bracciano, motorbike trips through the cobbled laneways of Rome. Secret trips to the top of the cupola at St Peters, snow covered getaways in Umbria. He cooked spaghetti and laughed at the small portions I ate as he urged me to manga. He greeted me in the morning with cornetti and baci chocolates, and covered me in kisses at the traffic lights. I studied Italian in Florence and promised myself I would never speak a word of English again. I was in love, and Italy returned my affection. At the age of 29, I was home.

When I was alone I had my notebook, and I wrote of the way Italy was showing me how to live. Every day, I recorded the tiny moments. I came to know Italy and I came to know myself, each word a tiny postcard of the soul. Andrea was a thread that bound the experience to my heart, a man who showed me deep inside the Romani way, to places the tourists don’t see. And I am grateful.

And then it was time for the story to end.

I sobbed my goodbyes on that train journey from Stazione Termini to Fiumicino airport. A kindly nonno passed me some fazzoletti and carmello (tissues and a lolly). I sobbed when I landed back in Melbourne. My Italian sojourn, the love and the lovers, a brief interlude in a life that was forever changed by Italy and her grace. I will return this year. I have been homesick for twenty years. Like Romulus and Remus, Rome is my mother. I have adopted her, and she has cradled me in memories.

I returned with three filled journals in my suitcase. My writings still await my shaping – a twenty-year love story that has no ending, and is always beginning.