Daily Bread [ no more ]
“…i know the process. This is daily bread for a ghostwriter. What you have to deal with in general, is clients who come to you with a few lines reading like teenage middle school level writing. Failing that, it’s a voice recording on a comparable level. You make the draft. Of course it gets rejected, but the client already proceeds to absorb your work and ideas and acts like it was theirs.
From here on out, you have to put up with your client either being unable to decide what they actually want [ you ] to say [ for them ] or with them getting stuck on certain passages over and over, or with them raving off on some vaguely related extra idea they had in the meantime and now want [ you ] to shoehorn in [ for them ]. The draft will likely bounce back and forth many, many times, often several times per day. The changes you’re asked for making to the draft, do not bring it closer to a final. They don’t help you with getting closer to a fair pay either.
It does help the client with feeling more comfortable with the idea that what’s going on here, it’s them being hard at work. With the writing. By that point they have convinced themselves that the result of the whole process is actually theirs. That is, technically. Legally, so to speak. Basically, from a pragmatical strictly business kind of angle, more or less… somewhat.
And this can go for days. If you’re down on your luck this can go on for bloody sucking weeks. The longer it goes, the worse it gets for you, and the better the client feels about themselves being… not so bad a writer after all!
Ironically, by the time your work gets finalized and published with their name on it, you can no longer claim that this is yours. Nor would you really want to. Everything original is either gone or butchered. Sure, you did the heavy lifting, did the grease work, put it all together, pushed it out of the hangar. On the side you also helped another ambitious, self-important [ hopefully at least ] paying amateur with making themselves understood. Never mind the fact that they explicitly came to you with the intent of buying you, to help them out with their writing problems. To ultimately claim your written words as their own.
But make no mistake, my dear ghostwriter: You did the work. All of it. That was you. The writing, and the rewriting, and the problem fixing, and the adult baby sitting. And then some. You did that. And if all goes well you help the client insert themselves into your own work so heavily, adapt to the needs and intentions of another so completely and unconditionally that, you manage to make yourself disappear.
They get the clout, the rights, and the glory, and you made it happen. That was you. You did that. So ironically, it’s all your fault.”
