On Ghostwriting Fiction: a Defense of Millie Bobbie Brown

Millie Bobbie Brown, the celebrated young English star of the hit series Stranger Things, has written a novel. Nineteen Steps came out last month. As neither Brown nor her publishers made any attempt to hide, the book was ghostwritten by Kathleen McGurl. That has led to considerable controversy, based on a simple question: how can a novel be ghostwritten without becoming entirely the work of the ghostwriter?

We think of ghostwriters primarily in terms of memoirs, and of course, that’s where many in my profession ply our trade. We also write political speeches, opinion pieces, magazine articles, cookbooks, and – yes – fiction. A ghostwriter’s task is to translate the memories, experiences, and convictions of our clients into prose. There’s no limit on what that can include.

Often a new client will say something like, “I want to write a book, but I’m not sure anyone will want to read it. Do I really have anything that important to say? And all my ideas are so jumbled! I have no idea where to even start!”

Millie and Kathleen; the author and ghostwriter. The latter doesn’t cancel out the former.

Every ghostwriter works differently, but we all have our tricks and techniques for helping a client organize their thoughts and memories. Sometimes, we work over Zoom calls. Sometimes, we give the client a prompt, and they muse at length on the page or into the voice memo app on their phones. That ghostwriters organize the ideas and put them into (one hopes) compelling and interesting prose doesn’t change the reality that these are, in the end, our clients’ experiences, memories, and beliefs. There is an art to ghostwriting, but much of the time, we are less artists than building contractors. We take the client’s vision and translate it into the tangible.

If someone says, “I have a vision of a beautiful Craftsman cottage, tucked away at the base of this particular hill,” we don’t say to them, “Well, you damn well better build it yourself with your own hands otherwise it will never truly be yours.” We wish them good luck finding the right contractor to manifest their dream. If they show us, say, their striking kitchen, cunningly organized, and tell us “It’s just how I imagined it” we don’t reply, “Don’t take any credit. Your contractor and his crew created this.”

Even if you don’t hire a ghostwriter, a good editor will transform and improve whatever manuscript you turn in. All editors are different, but the history of American literature is filled with towering figures like Maxwell Perkins – without whom we would not know the names F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, or Thomas Wolfe. (If The Great Gatsby is the greatest American novel of the first half of the twentieth century, it is only because Perkins worked so closely with a very erratic and unstable Fitzgerald to edit, rewrite, and finally deliver the book we all know so well.)

Your favorite columnist at the New York Times? They have researchers, assistants, and editors. Your favorite novel? Workshopped, rewritten, edited, often with the input of dozens. That doesn’t make the columnist any less talented. The existence of a Maxwell Perkins doesn’t tarnish the legacies of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe. The fact that the contractor was the one who actually put in the foundations of your dream home doesn’t mean it wasn’t, in fact, your dream.

When you listen to your favorite artist’s new album, you take it for granted (I assume) that the recording was made by producers and engineers. You understand, perhaps, the concept of multiple tracks and audio mixing. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a Taylor Swift, Dolly Parton, or Ryan Adams song – it just means that we only encounter the genius of a Taylor, a Dolly, a Ryan as the consequence of the creative decisions of many other people.

I like the term “ghostwriter.” I think it sounds cool. I also recognize that to the extent that the term conveys something secretive or even dishonest, it does a disservice to the profession. I appreciate that Millie Bobbie Brown and Prince Harry have both been very open about their use of ghostwriters. I nod along with Brown’s insistence that Nineteen Steps is, in the end, her book. A ghostwriter brought her idea to the page, but it is still Millie’s vision, however translated, molded, or refined. (Much has been made of the opening sentence of the book: “It was hot — the kind of heat that makes you long for the weather to cool down.” That’s Millie’s voice, surely. It’s easy to mock, but it’s genius to leave it just like that.)

I do not think it necessary to put ghostwriters’ names on the covers of books. The credit on the front of Beauty, Disrupted (the memoir of a legendary supermodel) reads, “Carré Otis, with Hugo Schwyzer.” That was my first published book – and the only one that has my name front and center. Everything else I’ve done, I’ve done anonymously, with my name only appearing briefly in the acknowledgements section. That’s partly because my past makes me notorious, and I don’t want my own “complexities” to draw attention away from my client. Much more to the point, it’s because I believe that including the “with” misleads the public into imagining that this isn’t fully the client’s story.

Do you have a book idea? Hire me, or another ghostwriter. (If you don’t want me to write the book with you, I offer coaching services as well, as do many in this business.)

Know this: whatever we do together will still, in the end, be entirely yours.