Being a ghost can be as scary and sad as seeing a ghost.
To be a ghost, you have to die first. And as the story goes, you stick around because there’s something you left unresolved.
So what about being a ghostwriter?
There you are, dead for at least some of the time, haunting other people’s minds. The part that dies is your own voice, except for a distant moaning.
There you are, looking for more minds to haunt. You end up with a mouth the size of a needle’s eye and a stomach the size of a mountain (as the Buddhist concept of hungry ghosts would have it).
One night I woke up in torment, thinking I had finally let my own voice die completely. My dead voice was haunting my sleepless body. It never said what it had to say, and I never even mourned it. I had been writing for other people for just too long. No way back.
But in the light of day, I realized it was more premonition than apparition. All I had to do was heed the warning of the ghost of writing future. All I had to do was use my voice and stop lingering in the grey charnel house of “content” and everything that dead word implies.
I’ve probably been at this a bit longer than most of my professional writer friends here. I’m warning you. Time can take its toll. If it’s you becoming a ghost, if you find your own voice fading into the wind, come back!
