Geishas With A Pen
Wonderful piece by my talented biographer friend David Rensin on LAObserved, on what it's like to be a "professional collaborator" on books. He's a master at disappearing and letting his subject speak, making it so natural you have no idea how excruciatingly hard it is until you try it yourself. He's written 13 books, 11 of them collaborations. He writes about collaborating:
I appreciate that Rutten used the word "collaborator" because too many people call it ghost-writing. While technically true (especially if you're relegated to a thank you in the acknowledgments), ghosting always makes me picture a celebrity/mogul's wife who tells the writer, "I want to do a romantic mystery about a Hollywood wife whose billionaire husband cheats, so she kicks him out, and then he dies. So she hangs with her girlfriends, goes shopping, and they solve the murder. Then she meets the one-in-a-million hunk who won't force her to give up her identity, shows her the meaning of life and fantastic sex - and still lets her go shopping. Can you do that? Great. Let me see it when it's done."Actually, in my experience, and the same goes for a number of excellent writers I know, the collaboration plays out over many meetings during which the "author" and "collaborator" discuss the project, make outlines, tape endless sessions of biography or comedy or adventure story, and put in a lot more work than the collaborator ever lets the unsuspecting "author" know is necessary. The late super-manager and super-Mensch Bernie Brillstein used to love telling people that I'd lied to him about how much work his memoirs required. Hell, we spent a year figuring out what it wasn't about before we settled on what it was about. Then we spent a year writing, reading, editing, rewriting.
The book collaborator is also a psychologist, confidant, interlocutor, and supportive friend. We defuse fears, hang out, massage egos, play Devil's Advocate, call our "authors" on the bullshit - gently. We have to be both honest and kind. And politic. Otherwise we're worthless.
Call us Geishas with pen.
Then the collaborator goes home and does the typing, bringing to bear his/her inherent ability to structure a story, embody the "author's" voice in the author's own words, make it funny and dramatic, and do all the stuff that we've learned to do well because, after all, this is not what the "author" does, otherwise he/she would write their own books instead of make movies/write songs/live on the edge/save lives/make jokes/do big science, etc.
Regarding Rutten's comment that a collaborator would likely have trimmed away the good stuff: balderdash. If anything, it's the "author" or manager or wife or agent or sibling or personal trainer who wants to excise passages that are intentionally or unintentionally too revealing. Every "author" wants to look good; collaborators want the goods. More to work with and make a fully-rounded story. Then we want to translate the "author's" authenticity to the page in a way that lets everyone still respect themselves in the morning.
Of course collaborators want to make sure that the "author" doesn't make a fool of him or herself. So we do research to get dates and names right. We advise. But we don't trim off the highs and lows like fat on a fine steak. Who wants to read, much less write, a boring book?
David's site: Tell Me Everything. His last book: All for a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora.
My David Rensin favorite (in addition to all of his Playboy Interview pieces): the hilarious and amazing The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up.
And, very all in the family, here's David's son Emmett's hilarious book, co-authored with Alexander Aciman: Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less.
Since ghostwriting is part of my job, I could relate to David Rensin's post about collaborating. Now I'm interested in reading more of his work. (The trick is to get more free time! :-))
DorianTB at September 3, 2010 11:45 AM
I'm appreciative that David actually know what a Geisha really is like, there are a lot of places where they get a bad rep. I think a lot of collaboration is actually like that. There are a lot of brilliant people who forget to tie their shoes. They need a helper to keep them from going off the rails. In writing too, there is a place for that person. I'm glad David pulled back the curtain a bit... and that the illustrious Amy showed me ;)
SwissArmyD at September 3, 2010 12:32 PM
Leave a comment