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It was the beginning of the twenty-first century and unless you were a regular reader of The Sun newspaper, you did not necessarily know who Jordan was or what her story might be.
‘She’s famous for having had her breasts enlarged. Her management are asking publishers for a million pound advance. Do you think it would be worth meeting her?’
‘She sounds like an interesting character.’
The agent was Andrew Lownie, one of the most distinguished independents in the business. He was one of the agents who responded to my ad in The Bookseller and we had worked together very successfully on a number of projects, all very different to this one. He agreed to set up a meeting and rang back a few hours later.
‘They want to have the meeting at her lawyer’s offices: Mishcon de Reya.’
‘Mishcon de Reya! Seriously?’
This was one of the biggest-hitting law firms in London. They had acted for the Princess of Wales in her divorce. This Jordan girl was not messing about. Lord alone knew how much a firm like this would be charging for their services.
The meeting room was surprisingly full when we arrived and I couldn’t help wondering how many of the shiny male managers and lawyers around the shiny conference table were charging by the hour.
Jordan, in the sort of skimpy dress a ‘saucy French maid’ might wear in a farce, had brought a friend with her and seemed totally relaxed in the surroundings despite the fact that she can’t have been much more than 25 years old. The two of them chatted and giggled like they were in Starbucks while the men attempted to talk business. Every so often, however, Jordan would interject with a question which completely cut through all the bullshit, and hold the eyes of whomever she was talking to with a disarming – and slightly alarming – intensity. I wasn’t completely convinced that she had enough of a story for a whole book, but I was completely convinced she would be fun to work with. She too said she would be interested.
After the meeting I made a few phone calls around publishers and other agents that I knew, just casually asking if they had heard of Jordan and whether they thought there was anything in it. With each phone call I found out more. It seemed that Jordan’s management team had already been to virtually every agent and publisher in the business, leading the conversation with the announcement that they were looking for a million pound advance.
I wasn’t surprised that this request was being greeted with derision by the industry but what did shock me was the level of disdain with which they all seemed to dismiss the would-be author herself, simply because of her profession and because of the audience to whom they thought she appealed. Publishers who would happily buy biographies of courtesans, actresses and prostitutes of the past, seeing them as colourful players in the pageant of history, did not like the idea of dealing with a living, breathing woman who promoted herself to the masses as a sex object. To be frank, they didn’t want to let her across their thresholds, let alone into the hushed and rarefied environs of their editorial departments. According to John Carey in his excellent book, The Intellectuals and the Masses, Rudyard Kipling observed that ‘the masses must pass into history before they become suitable for intellectual contemplation’. Snobbery, it seems, is a constant, if mutating, presence in the literary world.
For a few months everything went quiet and Andrew Lownie lost interest in the project. I believe Jordan changed her management company and someone within Mishcon de Reya reached out to Maggie Hanbury, another distinguished literary agent, who for a while was under the impression that she was being asked to represent a Middle Eastern country. Once that misunderstanding had been cleared up Jordan worked her steely charm again and the two women found that they understood one another. Sadly for me, Hanbury decided that Jordan would be more comfortable talking to a female ghost and I fell out of the picture. I remained, however, fascinated with what was to unfurl over the following years.
Even with her new literary ally, Jordan was still not able to win over the arbiters of taste within the big publishing houses. One independent publisher, a former tabloid editor called John Blake, however, understood what he was being offered and thought that, with the addition of plenty of pictures, it would be a deal worth doing. He offered her an advance of £10,000, a hundred times less than her representatives had originally been asking for. Showing a flash of the business sense that would soon make her a multi-millionaire, Jordan instructed her agent to accept the offer.
Two things then happened, which changed everything. John Blake came up with the idea of writing Being Jordan from the perspective of the real Katie Price, and Katie herself was invited to fly down to the Australian jungle and appear in I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here, where she caught the imagination of the British public, particularly the women, and conducted a very public romance with Peter Andre. A pop singer whose star had previously been waning, he became her first husband and father to two of her children. The target audience was no longer limited to male readers of The Sun because millions of women were now intrigued and wanted to know more and, as everyone in publishing knows, women are the ones who buy the most books, by a very large margin.
Being Jordan reputedly sold a million copies in hardback and editors in one of the major publishing houses who had previously refused to allow Jordan through their doors, were forced to offer Katie Price a seven figure sum to come to them with Rebecca Farnworth, her chosen ghostwriter. Cross with John Blake for signing up a rival model and for refusing to match this offer, Katie changed publishers and produced a stream of books in a variety of genres, most of which became colossal bestsellers, making no secret of the fact that she did not ‘do her own typing’. At the time of writing this she and Rebecca are still a team, with Lord knows how many titles under their belts.
Secrets and confidentiality agreements (#ulink_3b2f7d61-b0c9-599f-b0c0-507b51ebfeaa)
The ever-cheerful soap star peered suspiciously at the freshly delivered cover of her forthcoming autobiography.
‘Why hasn’t it got your name on it?’ she enquired.
‘Because I’m invisible,’ I reminded her. ‘It says so in my contract.’
‘Does it?’ It was obviously the first she had heard of any such stipulation. ‘Why’s that then?’
‘The publisher thinks it’s better.’
‘Why?’
‘They think the fans will prefer to believe that you wrote it yourself. They want them to picture you sitting down at your escritoire at the end of a hard day’s filming and pouring your heart out onto the page.’
‘Sitting at my what?’
‘Your writing desk.’
She emitted a tobacco-throated croak of mirth. ‘I don’t think anyone’s that thick, are they?’
‘It’s standard practice. The publisher just thinks it’s better.’
‘I’m not sure about that. I don’t want people to think that I’m pretending I can write a book. That’ll make me look like a right knob.’
Such frankness is always endearing in an author. Most, in my experience, are quite happy to confess that they have had help with ‘doing the typing’, as Katie Price would say; it is usually the lawyers and the publishers who insist on contracts that threaten the ghost with hanging, drawing and quartering if they even tell their pet spaniel that their clients didn’t write their own books. The paid advisers are equally fond of confidentiality agreements that forbid you from ever telling anyone anything that you might have found out that doesn’t actually make it into the published book. If the client removes all their clothes during a recording session or confides that they intend to top themselves, mum’s the word.
Things have become less draconian with the passing years and with the public’s growing awareness that most people will find it hard to dash off a book if they are also doing another full-time job like starring in a soap opera, playing in a professional football team or running a country. As a result there are now some books where the ghost is openly acknowledged on the cover or the flyleaf and is free to talk to everyone including the media about their involvement in the project, and others where quite the opposite is true. Likewise there are some author/ghost relationships where a level of trust exists without the necessity of a written confidentiality contract, and a ghost would guard their author’s secrets as fiercely as they would guard those of their friends and family. Those are the best ones. It is the state that all good ghosts should aspire to.
Glimpses of hell (#ulink_5d8987c5-e813-541e-ab5d-4c445de97106)
Living, as I do, in one of the safest and most prosperous islands in the world, and being part of a comfortable and loving family, it is easy to forget or to remain ignorant of the depths of hellishness that man is capable of inflicting on his fellow man, and frequently does. The collapse of the communist Eastern Bloc at the end of the eighties released a hurricane of shocking and fascinating human interest stories, carried back to the West by people who needed the help of ghostwriters to tell them.
When Romanian President, Nicolae Ceauşescu, was toppled from power and executed in 1989 his country was released from a quarter of a century of oppression. What horrified the outside world the most, however, was what was discovered inside the walls of the ‘orphanages for the irrecuperable’ which littered the country. Thousands of children who had been deemed to be of no use to Romania, or who had been ‘inconvenient’ births, were found locked up in these asylums, tied up in cots, starved, abused, driven insane and beaten until they eventually gave up living. This was what medieval Bedlams must have looked like. Western cameras went in and recorded scenes the like of which we had not seen in Europe since the liberation of the concentration camps after the Second World War.
After the collapse of Yugoslavia stories of war crimes and ethnic cleansing emerged daily as different factions and nationalities struggled to fill the power vacuum, committing any atrocities they deemed necessary. Soldiers, doctors, diplomats and charity workers all came out of the area with tales of unbelievable barbarity and many of them also needed ghostwriters to help them put into words horrors that had left them speechless.
The symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall seemed like a new beginning. Although the stories that had been hiding behind it were more prosaic than we had been led to believe by the propaganda of the Cold War, at a personal level they were both shocking and awe-inspiring. Individual stories of endless, grinding poverty, cruelty and darkness emerged into the light. Each story that was brought to me seemed more gruelling and shocking than the one before.
Out of that darkness, however, it was possible to make out glimmers of hope as good people made huge sacrifices and put their own lives on hold in order to help. A variety of ghostwritten books followed. There were tales of hopelessly crippled and apparently mad orphans being saved by Western surgeons and by the love of patient foster families. Bombed orphanages were rebuilt by soldiers, charities were set up and families who had been separated for a generation were reunited. There was so much to do but no shortage of people who wanted to help, and who then wanted to tell the stories of the horrors and the miracles they had witnessed.
For a writer it was a Pandora’s box: scenes of unspeakable evil and personal struggles, often leading to happy endings. I wrote the story of a small boy who had been tied up and imprisoned in an orphanage cot for the first four years of his life, condemned by the authorities as sub-human because he was believed to be both physically and mentally handicapped, who was saved by a volunteer and given a full life in the West. I did one for a soldier who rebuilt a bombed orphanage for a local town in his own time and went on to create a full-scale charity, and another for an English woman who had been trapped in Eastern Europe as a teenager just before the Second World War, not escaping back to her family in the West until the Iron Curtain finally fell just over half a century later. I also helped tell tales for some of the pioneering business pirates and ex-politicians who built vast fortunes as communism crumbled and a new frontier-land of opportunities opened up for those bold and ruthless enough to grab them.
These stories were the absolute stuff of life, horrifying and inspiring, sickening and uplifting, frightening and dramatic. I seldom cried while I was actually there in the orphanages, or actually listening to the stories (as Graham Greene once said ‘There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer’), but I confess that when I came to write the stories the ice would inevitably melt into tears. The goal then was to ensure that the readers would be equally moved to tears at the same time as being unable to stop turning the pages.
That splinter of ice (#ulink_33fad92a-b4cd-59f8-ab73-6653f564feee)
That ‘splinter of ice in the heart of a writer’ Greene talked about helps a great deal when listening to stories that have the potential to break your heart. Ghosts, like other authors, need to be able to remain objective, slightly distant, hovering above the emotion, watching and noting what it looks and sounds like. But at the same time we need to understand what it feels like in order to convey it to the reader.
If the person who is telling you the story is crying, then you need to be able to make the reader cry too when you reproduce the story on the page, but you won’t be able to do that if you get too close. You need to be interested in the story, amazed by it, moved by it, but you cannot let it cloud the clarity of your own thoughts while you are interviewing.
Sometimes I have sat with people who are in floods of tears when they tell their stories. More often they struggle to hold in those tears, their chins trembling, their eyes and noses running involuntarily, their voices cracking as they battle bravely on with the memories that cause them so much pain and which they want so much to exorcise. It is a cliché that many of the soldiers who had the most traumatic times in the trenches of the First World War never wanted to speak about their experiences once they got home. The same rule has applied to others who have suffered since in different ways but times have changed. The medical profession came to understand about post-traumatic stress and people are now encouraged to talk about their traumas in order to learn how to cope with them. It is still never an easy thing for most damaged people to do.
My role is to sit and wait, quiet and encouraging; never criticising them, never comforting them, never rushing them, just passing the tissues, assuring them there is no problem and waiting for them to feel able to continue.
Readers want to be moved to tears by stories, just as they want to be moved to laughter or to shrieks of fear. They want to ‘feel something’. A ghostwriter must catch the elements that produce that effect and reproduce them later on the page, not during the interview.
I guess therapists and analysts must work in the same way because often when I get to the end of the interviewing process the subject will say they feel like they have just been through a course of therapy. They are nearly always grateful to have been able to unburden themselves but still the fact remains that there was a splinter of ice required in order to achieve it – and that troubles me a little.
It isn’t only once work is under way that a ghost has to remain detached. Often the people who make initial enquiries about hiring a ghostwriter have heartbreaking tales to tell. To have to warn them that the fact that they have lost a child in appalling circumstances or been tortured for months by an oppressive regime does not necessarily mean that they will get a publishing deal, can seem unbearably cruel – but to give them false hope would be far crueller.
I suppose it’s the same in many other professions. A paediatrician must spend a large proportion of his or her time having to give heartbreaking news to parents. A press photographer sent to a war or disaster zone, a policeman dealing with the victims of a terrible crime or having to break the news of a death to a family. All these people can only function effectively in their jobs if they become detached in some way, deliberately inserting Greene’s cold, hard, necessary splinter of ice.
Suddenly you’re history (#ulink_66da1af1-9a23-5bcb-8dbb-f2c810506f1b)
Since these are my confessions, I guess I must reveal that I was more than a little in love with Twiggy when I was a schoolboy in the sixties. Although she was about four years older than me she did not seem as intimidatingly mature and grown up as the other models and film stars that my generation of boys were busily lusting after. In fact, she didn’t look that different to some of us when we were made-up to appear on stage in school plays. It was quite possible to imagine yourself on a date with her, despite her extraordinary and unusual beauty – not to mention her enormous global fame and iconic status.
So, when a publisher rang in the mid-nineties and asked if I would come to the office for lunch with Twiggy as she was looking for a ghostwriter, it set all my nostalgia glands tingling.
The lunch was delightful. Twiggy was delightful, and even though I didn’t get the job (again I was told they had decided a woman would be more suitable), I felt I had an anecdote that might at least interest, and possibly even impress, my children.
‘I had lunch with Twiggy last week,’ I announced casually over Sunday lunch.
‘Twiggy?’ my eldest daughter exclaimed, looking just as stunned as I thought appropriate for such a momentous event. ‘That’s amazing. We’re doing her at school, in history.’
Abused children find a voice (#ulink_108547ec-a748-58c8-8b15-c19430a6e8c5)
At the beginning of the nineties I started to receive phone calls and letters from people who wanted to write about abuses they had suffered in their childhoods. These were not people who had had the misfortune to be born in countries that were enduring brutal dictatorships, civil wars or ethnic cleansing campaigns, these were people who had been born and brought up in democratic, peacetime Britain, a country that prided itself on being civilised, with developed social welfare services.
Their calls seemed to be cries for help and as I talked to them I became aware of just how much courage it had taken most of them to pick up the phone in the first place. These were people whose experiences did not lead them to expect to be listened to or believed but they had the courage to keep on trying to tell their stories. Many of the things they told me tore my heart out and I felt sure there would be a readership for them if I could just get them out into the bookshops.
I wanted to find out more about their lives and I wanted to help them to tell their stories as movingly and dramatically as possible. It seemed likely that if these stories were moving me then they would move other people as well.
When, as a teenager, I read Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell I had been particularly struck by a scene in Paris where Orwell reports meeting a man called Charlie, whom he describes as ‘a local curiosity’. Charlie tells of visiting a girl who is being kept prisoner in a cellar which had been tricked out as a bordello-style bedroom and was guarded upstairs by an old crone. Charlie told how he gave the old woman a thousand francs, which he had stolen from his drunken brother.
‘Voilà,’ the woman said, ‘go down into the cellar there and do what you like. I shall see nothing, hear nothing, know nothing. You are free, you understand – perfectly free.’
Orwell reports Charlie’s experiences in the cellar as if they make Charlie an interesting and colourful character, but it struck me that it was the girl whose story was actually the most mysterious and interesting. How had she got there? Who had betrayed her? What was the rest of her life like? What was she thinking? What were her dreams? What became of her? Her story seemed more intriguing than the story of the narrator (Orwell himself), an Old Etonian playing at being a ‘plongeur’ for a while (a bit like an early version of the student gap year), before becoming a literary legend.
The stories that I was now hearing seemed just as fascinating, coming from a dark world that was unknown to me and that I wanted to understand better. I couldn’t understand how so many people could be getting away with abusing children and I had difficulty imagining what it must feel like to be one of those children. It seemed to me that it would be a good thing to shine some bright lights into these dark corners of the human experience, so that everyone could understand more. They also seemed to me to be perfect fairy tales; good versus evil, innocent little heroes and heroines fighting back against terrible villains.
Filled with optimism I kept listening to the stories, writing synopses and sample material and trying to persuade publishers that they should publish them. The reaction was always the same: ‘No one,’ the publishers all informed me, ‘wants to read such gruelling and depressing stories.’ Child abuse, they believed, was all too horrible to contemplate. Even amongst the most liberal of them I could detect scepticism; was it possible that such terrible things could be happening in our own country? Surely not.
But what, I kept asking, were pantomimes like Cinderella and Snow White about if it wasn’t child abuse? And what about Dickens’s tales from the workhouses and back streets of Victorian England? Do we really believe that the Artful Dodger and his pals were required to do nothing worse than steal a few pocket handkerchiefs and watches on behalf of their violent, thieving, drunken masters? Even the orphaned Harry Potter starts out abused by the aunt and uncle charged with his guardianship.
I truly couldn’t understand how the same publisher could produce so many books about war, genocide and murder, creating bestsellers by glamorising, stylising and fetishising serial killers and rapists, mafia bosses and military leaders, and at the same time think that genuine, original stories by children who had been victimised were somehow too tasteless to be told.
Then in 1993 Dave Pelzer self-published his memoir, A Child Called It, in America, and it became a word-of-mouth bestseller, filtering up into my consciousness via my children and their friends, who were passing it around in the school playground, much to the consternation of some of their parents and teachers.
A few years later I received email from a man who wanted to write something similar about his own childhood with a violent and abusive mother. I warned him that my experience told me I might not be able to sell the book to publishers. He said that he was willing to take the risk and wanted to commission me to write the book anyway.
It was a good story. Once it was completed I sent it to Barbara Levy, an exceptionally discreet and gentle agent, who I knew would be sympathetic when it came time to break the bad news to the author that it was unsaleable. I had reckoned without the ‘Pelzer-factor’.
Within a week Barbara had three publishers making offers and the book went for a six figure advance. It then sat at the top of the bestseller lists for weeks and eventually went on to be made into a movie. The game had changed entirely. Other publishers saw this success and remembered that I had been in to see them in the past. They started ringing to find out if I still had any other stories that could be packaged in a similar way. On one memorable day editors from three different publishing houses, all having just come from editorial planning meetings, rang within a few hours of one another with the same request. I had plenty of stories ready and waiting, all I had to do was introduce the people with the stories to the people who now really wanted the stories, and then write them.
The demand seemed insatiable. Supermarkets started to stock the resulting titles in massive quantities and kept asking the publishers for more. I was in a publisher’s office introducing one of these clients when another publisher, whom we had been to see earlier in the day, rang my mobile. I excused myself and slipped out of the room to take the call.
‘If you leave that building now,’ the other publisher said, ‘I will give you quarter of a million pounds.’
I felt like Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire. The client and I then spent a surreal afternoon taking calls from the two publishers, finally clinching the deal before putting her back on her train home. Three months later exactly the same thing happened with another client’s story of abuse. (I will be explaining later in the ‘filthy lucre’ chapter how sums like this will soon be whittled away by reality to become far less dramatic figures, but these occasional episodes of apparent largesse on the part of publishers do at least provide temporary doses of adrenaline and optimism to any writer’s life.)
Books that I wouldn’t have been able to interest anyone in a few months before were now the objects of ferocious bidding wars between the publishers with the biggest cheque books. I ended up writing about a dozen of them, selling some in conjunction with agents such as Barbara Levy and Judith Chilcote and some under my own steam. For a while they virtually all became bestsellers. There was one week when there were actually three of them in the Sunday Times charts at the same time. In some cases I was contracted to remain anonymous, but several of them graciously put my name on the flyleaf, such as The Little Prisoner by Jane Elliott, Just a Boy by Richard McCann, Daddy’s Little Earner by Maria Landon, Cry Silent Tears by Joe Peters and Please, Daddy, No by Stuart Howarth.
So, who was reading these books that the publishers had been so sure would be too terrible for anyone to bear? Initially there was the ‘tourist trade’; people who, like me, could not imagine what it must be like to live in such a world and wanted to understand it better. Then there were the actual citizens of this ‘hidden’ world; the children who had suffered or witnessed abuse and were wanting the comfort of knowing that they were not alone. There is no way of ever quantifying how many people suffer some sort of bullying or abuse in their childhood which leaves them scarred in some way, but let’s take a guess that it is around 10 per cent of the population. That includes those abused in the home, in care, or by authority figures like priests or school teachers. That is 6 million people in the UK alone.
Then there are those who simply want to read scary, tear-jerking tales about little heroes and heroines overcoming monsters; the same people who want to see Cinderella go to the ball and Oliver Twist escape from the clutches of Fagin and Bill Sykes.
People who had been keeping their own stories of abuse secret due to a mixture of fear and shame, suddenly saw that it was all right to speak out. The stories I was being brought grew more and more extreme and horrific. No one was going to be able to pretend that child abuse was not a problem in society any longer. The misery memoir phenomenon became a bubble, with all the big publishers rushing onto the shelves with look-alike products. Within a few years the market was saturated and books that would previously have been given advances of hundreds of thousands of pounds were having trouble finding publishers once more.
The genie, however, was now out of the bottle and it wasn’t long before abusers and bullies were being named and shamed in any number of previously inviolable institutions from schools to churches, orphanages to mental hospitals and even the BBC, to a point where it started to look to some like a witch hunt.
Some time later I heard a highly distinguished publisher on a podium being asked by a member of the audience what he thought of the ‘misery memoir’ genre. He was not one of those who had joined in the gold rush and I assumed that he was going to say something dismissive.
‘I think they changed the art of autobiography for ever,’ he said. ‘They forced authors to be much more open and revelatory. It is no longer good enough to tell anecdotes about the day you “met Prince Philip” or “danced with Sammy Davis Junior”; if you want to capture the hearts of readers you have to open up your emotional life as well and talk honestly and from the heart. I think they did the genre a great service.’
Sacked by a glove puppet (#ulink_74366910-b86b-5eda-a037-8a7124d68d5e)
Everyone around the boardroom table was entirely in agreement; at no stage and no time was anyone allowed to admit out loud or in writing that our celebrity was not a real person. Never mind that the celebrity in question was made of felt, this was the merchandising business, there had to be rules. The lawyers insisted.
My job, as the chosen ghostwriter, was to produce an autobiography which would fill in this celebrity’s back story, his early life before he found fame, and exactly what happened to him in the ‘wilderness years’ before his comeback as a potentially money-making merchandising vehicle. There were many careers resting on the outcome of this exercise, most of them sitting round that table in their shirtsleeves – brainstorming and sipping mineral water.
I had been hired by the distinguished publisher who had agreed to bring the eventual book out under his distinguished imprint. It was a nice job for both of us. For me it felt a bit like being given a licence to write fiction (although, of course, it wasn’t fiction because the lawyers said so and the story must, therefore, be spoken of at all times as non-fiction, even though I was going to be making it up).
One of the golden rules of writing both fiction and non-fiction must be to be fundamentally truthful in your writing, and if you aren’t going to be truthful then you’d better be as entertaining as hell. But, of course, truthful was the option to go for here, because the lawyers said so.
Our hero had found fame in the seventies and we all know how badly celebrities were allowed to behave in those days. Now, it seemed to me, was the time for him to ’fess up to every little indiscretion (this was before the really heinous and unamusing revelations of the period started to emerge). I was also sure readers would understand exactly why he went off the rails during the wilderness years – wouldn’t everyone if subjected to the pressures of sudden fame and fortune? To hold on to the readers’ sympathies I felt we must come clean about the addictions and the dodgy business deals that he had become involved in during those years at the same time as dropping the names of all the celebrities he had mingled with.
Once the manuscript was finished and both the distinguished publisher and I were happy that we had done full justice to the whole Greek tragedy of this celebrity’s rise and fall and resurrection, there was another meeting in the same boardroom. We arrived, feeling extremely pleased with ourselves, but now the men and women in shirtsleeves were no longer smiling. The celebrity, apparently, was not happy with the way he had come across. The ghost was going to have to be replaced by someone who understood what was expected of them.
‘The thing we have to remember,’ the distinguished publisher sighed as we stood on the street outside, forlornly scouring the horizon for a taxi to whisk us away from the scene of our humiliation, ‘is that nobody around that table has ever commissioned anything bigger than a fridge magnet.’
I felt better for his wise words.
A debt to Dale Carnegie (#ulink_5e51629a-147e-507a-b286-fc62d79edd5c)
‘You’re like a human Hoover,’ my wife complained as we drove home from the dinner party. ‘That poor woman …’
‘What poor woman?’ I truly didn’t know what she was talking about. I had been basking in the afterglow of what I thought had been a pleasant evening out.
‘The one you were cross-examining about her love life.’
‘I wasn’t cross-examining her,’ I protested, ‘I just pressed the button and everything poured out. She was a human Nespresso machine.’
‘You do it all the time. You’re like the Spanish Inquisition. Some people like to preserve a little privacy, you know.’
She was right, of course, I do it all the time, but in my experience most people love talking about themselves, and those who don’t pretty quickly clam up or tell me to mind my own business. It was a secret I learned at the age of 17 when I was heading for London in search of streets paved with gold with virtually no social skills at all.
How, I wondered as I watched those around me socialising with apparent ease, did people find things to talk about to strangers at parties? How did you find things to say to young women on first dates? (Bearing in mind that my early romantic education had come from the regency novels of my mother’s Georgette Heyer collection, since when I had been incarcerated in single- sex boarding schools.) The adult world seemed a daunting, if exciting, place and I was desperate to discover the secret of all the grown-ups who seemed so self-confident in every social situation.
In my search for a magic formula I came across How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. The book had been written in 1936, so was already more than 30 years old and more than 40 years later I can still remember the key message. Mr Carnegie explained that virtually everyone loves to talk about themselves and about their pet subjects. If you keep asking them questions they will keep answering them and the more they talk the more material you have for follow-up questions. The vast majority of people will come away from the conversation thinking you are the most charming and interesting person in the world, even if they have not asked you a single question about yourself (and it is my experience that a shocking number of people will fall silent the moment you stop asking the questions, even at private dinner tables where you would assume they wanted to be polite).
For a self-conscious teenager setting out to enter the adult world this one piece of advice was priceless; for someone wanting to make a living as an author and ghostwriter it has proved invaluable.
Over the years it has become such an ingrained habit that there is more than a little truth in my wife’s fear that the technique can be intimidating for those who might be unused to talking about themselves. Of course, it should be applied with some sensitivity, but at the same time there are so many questions which are so fascinating they are irresistible, even if they are considered impertinent: how much do you earn? Why did you divorce your husband? Are you having an affair with that man over there? Why do you suppose your children hate you? … It’s amazing how many people reward straight questions with extremely full and revealing answers.
The first questions a ghostwriter should ask (#ulink_0838311d-b5cb-5c3e-84a8-da9a9692c5c2)
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.
