Writing is many things, and one of them is channeling. As a writer you are a conduit, a crucible. You are a voice, whether you are interrogating your own ideas, bringing life to characters fictional or real, or simply reporting what you have seen so that others can understand. When you write you are often channeling other people directly, and when you are not it is because you are doing it indirectly: building on the ideas and thoughts of all those people who came before. 

You are the vessel.

Nobody understands this more than the ghost—the invisible writer behind the autobiography, capturing the story, piecing it together. The mimic, the unseen actor, the editor before the editor. 

There has been a lot of fun in ghostland recently, with the news that actor Millie Bobby Brown wrote a bestselling historical fiction novel that she didn’t actually write. And it got extra attention because it is, apparently, Very Bad Indeed (the compelling evidence, if you haven’t seen it, is boiled down in the opening lines: “It was hot — the kind of heat that makes you long for the weather to cool down and the leaves to fall, but then you berated yourself for wishing away the good weather.”)

Earlier this year another ghost, John Moehringer, who wrote Prince Harry’s memoir Spare, detailed his work and approach in The New Yorker. The story was a memoir itself—or perhaps a prelude to a memoir—though I presume he wrote this one alone. It was an accounting of why somebody ends up a ghost. A reckoning, too, with critics and the media and Twitter griefers. 

It didn’t make me want to read the book. But one thing that did grab me, though, was Moehringer’s side-eye toward Ghosting, Andrew O’Hagan’s extraordinary 2014 piece about his life as Julian Assange’s ghostwriter. I remember exactly where I was when I read it: usually I save the London Review of Books for reading in print, but it takes a little while to arrive in California, and I was so greedy to devour those 25,000 words that I read the whole thing on my phone in one immense sitting, at home, in the back of a taxi, in the office. I just couldn’t stop. My screen was worn out from scrolling, my eyes pinched and puckered by the end.

O’Hagan’s piece made me understand what ghostwriting really was, and how—even when it was a professional slalom, and whether it features princes or protesters—it is really no different from most other writing. It’s clairvoyance: you are reaching into the minds of others.

It felt like a little slander to accuse O’Hagan’s ghosting technique as unconventional—“it sounded to me like Elon Musk on mushrooms—on Mars.” But then again, it felt deeply appropriate for a royal ghost to be worried about decorum. And then, in fact, it turned out that the criticism was actually an attempt to extract a pound of flesh for what he felt was a bad review of Spare. Maybe visiting petty revenge upon your critics is even more in keeping with the crown?

It made me think of Salman Rushdie’s line in The Satanic Verses: “Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that’s what.” There’s a man who knows about revenge, petty or otherwise.

(Photo shared under CC license BY-SA 2.0 from Flickr user Marketa)