Skip to main content

Ghost Writing

I always thought it was okay for someone to be a ghost-writer for the money as long as they also wrote for themselves - sometimes following one's passion however doggedly just does not pay the bills. Christine Larson reports in her NYT article that ghost writing is one of the best careers of 2008. She talks about the commonly held notion about its practitioners :

Doing something people regard as art — writing — for cash, and in someone else’s voice, seems suspect in a world where we’re exhorted to pursue our passions and express our true selves.

Larson, a ghost-writer herself also tells us what such a profession is good for :

SOMETIMES, suspending your own ego isn’t such a bad thing: Compromise in the work world can bring compensation, too — beyond the kind that pays the bills. Ghostwriting has let me climb inside other people’s lives and forced me to respect choices I wouldn’t have made myself.

I’ve learned to listen more carefully, and to never, ever assume that I know how people feel. These skills improve my work when I’m writing under my own byline, too. So I’m skeptical when I hear sunny exhortations urging workaday slobs like me to chase our dreams and to forgo (or condense) the evils of the office and all its compromises.

In the end, ghost-writing does not seem that different from other kind of work. You could be at the lower-rungs of the corporate totem pole with great ideas that you present after a lot of back-breaking analysis. The higher-ups merely distill its essence and pitch the idea as their own, to the powers that be. They go on to win the kudos and promotions while you get assigned to yet another challenging assignment they could pluck when it is ripe and ready. That does not sound a lot different from ghost-writing - only a loss less rewarding professionally and financially.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more