This first ran on Splice Today.
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Writing gets demystified pretty quickly when you do it for a living. All the stuff you hear in creative writing programs about cultivating your own voice or writing what you know or making the familiar strange — pretty much nobody who will pay you actually gives a shit. Instead, the kind of things your clients are likely to focus on are, can you meet a deadline? Can you be just as entertaining and accessible as we’ve decided the audience would like you to be, without being so entertaining and accessible that someone gets offended? Can you figure out something to say about dietary supplements without instantly revealing that neither you, nor we, nor really anybody cares about dietary supplements? In short, can you competently jump through the hoops at your boring day job the way that everybody else has to jump through the boring hoops at their boring day jobs? And can you do it without too many glaring grammatical errors?
Like I said, you figure all this out fairly quick. Or, at least, it seems like you would. Not Anna Davies, though. Davies is, she tells us right at the beginning of her essay a “real writer” — and as proof, she says she’s ghost-written a massively popular YA series. She clearly intends for us to be impressed — and, hey, I can oblige happily enough. I was impressed. Ghost-writing a massively popular YA series— that sounds like a great, relatively enjoyable source of steady income. I’d do it if I had the chance.
Anna, though, doesn’ t present it as an enjoyable source of steady income. Instead, she makes it sound like some sort of Faustian bargain, in which she sold her inner glittery snowflake for ugly, mundane cash. She’d wanted to be a famous YA writer herself, but all she did was write other people’s series. She buried her muse so thoroughly that even her editor tells her, “You write well, but nothing has heart.” To which she replies, in a transcendent psalm of self-pity:
“Of course nothing did. I’d given it to them. I’d given them my time, my talent, my 20s. And that was the lesson that had somehow gotten buried as I learned to create characters, set scenes and turn around a revise in three days: Never give more than you’re prepared to lose. In the course of five years and approximately 600,000 words, I’d become so good at mimicking the voice of another author that I’d lost my own, and I’d failed to nurture my own career, not to mention well-being, as carefully as I had the lives of the characters that had never belonged to me.”
Davies has written for the New York Times and Marie Claire, and is making her declaration of failure from Salon. Clearly, she spent some time in there nurturing her career. But putting that aside, what exactly is she complaining about here? That all her dreams didn’t come true? That she had to work at a job that was occasionally unpleasant and felt like work? That after five years she’s only a quite remarkably successful writer rather than being J.K. Rowling? I don’t mean to be cruel, but, jeez, buck the fuck up.
To be fair, when you read the whole essay, you get the impression that there is more going on with Davies than she is quite willing or able to explain. She talks about her mother’s death; she talks about drinking too much; she talks about relationship failures. It doesn’t exactly add up, but for whatever reason, she’s obviously quite unhappy. I don’t think she’s lying about that, and I certainly don’t blame her for it.
Still, for a working writer, it is kind of irritating to see my profession presented as some sort of catastrophic self-betrayal, and/or as leading inevitably to a dark night of the soul. Reading it, I felt (presumptuously, but still) like I’d gotten a little glimpse of how sex workers feel when they have to sit through yet another documentary about how debased and miserable they are. Work for hire can be exploitive and depressing just like any other job, of course, and sometimes folks will treat you badly (or in the worst case not pay you.) But there’s nothing about it that’s inherently demeaning, or no more so than any other kind of employment.
Davies though, thinks there is. Work for hire function in her essay as a weight and a corruption, the thing that has prevented her from becoming a real writer, or even a real person. It’s like being a ghost writer has made her a real ghost; as if writing for someone else has turned her into no one. She seems, in other words, to have confused her job with her soul, and to have lost perspective in a catastrophic manner on the fact that being a ghost is just a gig. It’s not a sign that you are dying.
It sounds like she regrets not having major success on her own, like J.K. Rowling (as you point out), and she’s blaming her years spent as a ghost writer. But for ghost writing, she thinks, she would have made a deep mark on literature, been a literary star in her own right. “I coulda been a contender.”
C’mon–this was over the course of years, right? She chose to keep doing it.
Something I find interesting is that ghost writing is becoming less ghostly these days. My daughter is obsessed with the Erin Hunter Warriors books, the series about wild cats and spirit magic. But she and all her fifth grade friends also know that Erin Hunter is a pseudonym for a group of four writers–and they know the writers’ names.
Is that a new phenomenon? Didn’t everybody know (or think they knew) who actually wrote stuff like Nancy Drew back in the day too?
I think the Internet makes that information available in a way that it wasn’t back when I was a kid.
Not entirely new though. People figured out who Carl Barks was, after all…
How widespread was that knowledge outside of a core fan community, though? When I read those Carl Barks stories as a kid in 1970s reprints, they were completely anonymous to me.
I was into a certain YA series in jr. high, and even though the pseudonym was on the cover and title page, the specific author of each book was clearly included in the front pages. (This was in the early 80’s.)
I think you’re wrong to read that essay as an author’s indictment of her job. This is what I took to be her central point:
“I saw what anyone else could have noticed years ago: The books had become a cheap substitute for everything in my life that should have mattered. The books had taken center stage during relationships, job searches and friendships.”
She also talks about losing her voice, but again that blame falls back on herself. (She describes it as “given,” not taken.) Like, there are some elitist attitudes in that piece for sure? But you’re missing where she places the blame; that’s not a piece about the evils of work for hire.
Hmmm…I read it a long time ago (this is a reprint). But looking at it again…I don’t know, Kim. yes, it’s about her issues. But it’s also using the metaphor of ghost writing as a way to talk about losing the self. Work for hire is killing her soul.
There’s just no sense that this is maybe kind of a good gig, or that she’s really super successful as a writer by any measure that isn’t J.K. Rowling. I think the headline writer is accurate; it’s about her dirty, secret writing life— and the reason it’s dirty is that it’s work for hire.
” I hope would-be writers realize how much can be lost when you invest all your time and energy in someone else’s narrative.”
That’s the final line; a warning about the dangers of ghost writing and how it will damage your authentic self.
To which I say, phooey.
For what it’s worth I don’t think her piece is good or insightful, and I agree w/ more of your points about writing than hers. But I read her essay as a lament about her own life choices, not an indictment of the industry. From that point of view, “buck the fuck up” sounds sort of like ‘can you even believe this sniveling bitch?’ I just don’t understand the contempt in your response to her (admittedly not so great) essay.
well, I also say that she seems to be having some serious problems, which I don’t want to downplay. I have sympathy for her distress (though she doesn’t really explain where that distress comes from).
I think it’s bad to mythologize writing the way she does; it gives people unrealistic expectations which I think cause real harm. So, that’s where the antipathy comes from.
I am reminded of what Laura Resnick has said. Her father is a noted sci-fi author and Resnick herself has written media tie-in books. She said hey, it’s a paying job and quotes her father Michael Resnick. Starving for your principles (i.e. don’t sell out and be a ghost writer) is noble. Making your wife and children starve for your principles is chickenshit.
When Michael Caine was asked “what did you do that awful Jaws movie you were in for?” He replied, “I did it for a million dollars.” Hard to argue with that.
I thought the piece was about the experience of someone who aspired to personal expression in her chosen genre (YA fiction) but found she lost her voice in executing someone else’s vision. I can see how that could happen: “What makes a good Nancy Drew book” isn’t the same question as “what am I trying to say”. You can see a similar phenomenon in comics when talented artists for Marvel/DC comics cut loose on personal projects that are just not revelatory, but read like off-brand versions of the same. Kudos to her for frankly exploring this. I wouldn’t take it as a slight on any and all work for hire.
But…you just used an analogy to suggest that it’s a problem not just with her experience, but with work for hire in general.
I think that’s indicative of the point the article makes, and of the way it suggests that work for hire damages your individual voice.
But it’s fiction writing, you see.
I don’t really think fiction writing comes from a different place than any other kind of writing.
Huh? Fiction is not the same as any other kind of writing. It’s got its own standards and skill set. She’s talking about finding her own voice as a fiction writer, and pretending to be somebody else, and keeping it secret. That isn’t a comment on every other kind of writing for a paycheck.
@Egon You seem to be implying that writers of non-fiction don’t need to “find their voice.@
No, there’s a priority on personal style and vision when you’re making stuff up, but it would be completely ridiculous to say that there’s no such thing in nonfiction.
“there’s a priority on personal style and vision when you’re making stuff up”
Except in all those cases where there isn’t.
Work for hire is a gig, not a threat to your spirituality or your individual voice. This is the case in fiction or nonfiction. If you see work for hire as an existential threat, that’s really confused.
As I said, there are hints in the piece that her real issue is something else, and something real. She mentions personal losses and substance abuse. It’s also possible that her job was horrible for reasons that she doens’t make clear in the piece. However, she doesn’t seem to have wanted to address this stuff, so instead, she blames work for hire itself for causing a spiritual crisis. I think that’s misguided and misleading.
Ugh, never mind.
Wow, this one wasn’t even my fault!
Noah, I don’t think what she was struggling with was that vague in the original essay. It was burnout, loneliness, and dashed expectations. She sacrificed her personal relationships and all the time and energy she could have spent writing her own material or just having a life away from the keyboard on books that do not bear her name. She received money, experience, and some professional standing. I think she appreciated those things, but she expected more. She was led to believe that the job would be a stepping stone, and she probably gave those non-committal enticements more credence than she should have. She was already working. If she could make the choice again, she would have had less money in the bank account, more time with friends and family that she can now never get back, and more of her own writing done.
Of course, in five years time, the choices she regrets now may have paid off in completely unexpected ways, but it’s difficult to see that now. And I could just be projecting…
That seems reasonable, but it’s not quite the essay she wrote, I don’t think. “Ghost writing robbed me of my voice” is not exactly the same as, “I thought ghost writing would advance my career more than it did.”
A friend of mine back in the 1970s blew my mind when he said rather casually, “I write romance novels.” He was a fellow comics collector, and I knew for his normal job he was a facilities manager for a small building complex, but I never suspected he was not only an active writer, but he was getting paid for it. Another long-time great friend of mine was openly a professional writer, but despite the fact he’s had more than a dozen non-fiction books published, it became clear to him (and thus me, vicariously) that with all the research involved, one book or so a year probably generates far less income than a homeless guy asking for handouts at a freeway off-ramp.
Getting published can be a challenge. Getting paid to write is harder still. Getting regularly paid to write as a sole source of income is exceptionally hard. And getting rich as a writer, ala J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin, is fantastically and stupendously hard.
So, yeah, she should quit her whining, write, and let the chips fall where they may.
There was an article somewhere a few months ago talking about the semi-open secret of quality literary writing — that people who do it full time are very often subsidised by a spouse who works a real job, or by a trust fund, and that’s the only reason they can afford to do it. Can’t remember where I saw that, tho.