Читать книгу Confessions of a Ghostwriter - Andrew Crofts - Страница 19

The first questions you ask in any relationship are always the hardest. The answers you receive are going to become the signposts for the journey the conversation is going to take from then on.

I receive three or four enquiries a day from people who want to write books, mostly via email in recent years. The first things I ask for are a brief synopsis of the story (the sort of thing we might eventually see on the back cover), and some explanation of what their expectations are for the book. Are they hoping for a bestseller, for instance, or do they want to self-publish a few copies for friends and family?

Most are able to respond to those questions, however unsure they may be of their own ability with words. If they find writing even that much is beyond them then we might try opening the dialogue in a phone call.

Once I start the actual process of listening to the story it is always a good idea to begin at the beginning and work forward chronologically, even if the early days of someone’s life appear irrelevant to the story they actually want to tell. The ghost needs to get to know them in order to recognise what questions to ask later. Only by knowing what has gone before will the ghost be able to gauge how they will think, feel and react in certain situations. Starting by talking about their earliest memories and perhaps their relationship with their parents, is nearly always going to break the ice nicely. Once the ice is broken and they feel comfortable the conversation will flow quite normally, with the ghost simply steering the chronology like a sheepdog herding memories instead of sheep, ferreting out the details as and when they are required in order to be able to visualise and understand the stories that are being told.

In many ways a ghostwriter is merely asking all the same questions that a reader would ask if they were in the room with the author rather than reading the eventual book.