CliffordThurlow.com - Profile of a UK based ghostwriter and editor
Title
Ghostwriter Editor Screenwriter - Clifford Thurlow
Description
Clifford Thurlow is one of Britain's top ghostwriters He has published more than a dozen books in more than thirty editions covering subjects from Afdera Fonda Franchetti to Salvador Dali. As an editor he has helped many new writers into publication. His latest book, Making A Killing (Virgin, October 2006) tells the story of Captain James Ashcroft's 18 months on the front line in private security in Iraq.
Contact
- Clifford Edward Thurlow
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Additional Information
Making A Killing
Clifford Thurlow on Life as a Ghost
Making A Killing is my sixth book as a ghostwriter. Actually, seventh. But with one I have a "contractual obligation" never to breathe a word to a living soul as the celebrity whose memoirs I had written had an ego as fragile as a fresh meringue.
When someone employs a ghost, as the flaws, triumphs and lessons of their life unfold their sense of satisfaction is shadowed by a vague resentment that they didn't write it themselves – it looks so easy they often convince themselves that the ghost was merely an amanuensis not writing but recording their pearls of wisdom.
It is one of the pitfalls of the trade, the one that stings most being when the book finally appears on the shelves it is, naturally, and contractually, the storyteller's name that's on the cover, while your own name appears – and often doesn't – as the discreet "with" on the title page.
Not that the sting lasts. Writers write because that's what they are driven to do. Fame and fortune (yes please!) are the infrequent by-products of the craft, but few writers set out with the fame dream as their driving force and fewer succeed if that is their only fuel. When you have ghost-written a book, it is your words that fill the pages and while your partner is off chatting about their book on Radio 4, you just have to get on with the next one.
Working with James Ashcroft on Making A Killing was an exception to the rule. Ash is a former infantry captain who, bored with civvy life, became a gun for hire in Iraq in September 2003. After spending 18 months on the front line, his story about the secret world of private security had all the ingredients of Andy McNab's Bravo Two Zero with the added spice of pointing the finger at who he believes is responsible for the looming civil war in Iraq.
Ash had survived days of blistering mortar bombardment, car bombs, ambushes on the streets and murderous gunfights in a volatile war where, as he says, the rules are still being written. Private security contractors, as they are called, earn up to a $1,000 a day and now outnumber non-US Coalition Forces in a war that is slowly being privatised.
Captain Ashcroft knew he had an important story to tell and knew it would be best told with the help of a ghostwriter. Ash had studied law at Oxford and trained at Sandhurst. He is extremely capable – he escaped from Baghdad by the skin of his teeth. But like having an ear for music, writing requires a skill you don't learn at a military academy. Even the best in the world.
If you write a rhythmic description of the desert drive from Kuwait City to Baghdad, drawing the reader into the story, a half page may be compelling. Fill the page and it's a yawn. Where do you draw the line? How do you cut? What do you cut? It is good editing as much as good writing that makes a page turner, and that's what we set out to achieve with Making A Killing.
Ghostwriting, as I've said, has its pitfalls, but also its pleasure. After serving my time as a cub reporter in Kent, I had gone to Hollywood with the idea of surfing – the waves, not the net - and writing film scripts. Fortune favours the bold, they say, and at 23 I had the nerve to walk into an agent's office to ask for a job. The English actress Carol White (Cathy Comes Home, Up the Junction) had spoken to the literary agent Jeffrey Simmons and on his advice was looking for help with her memoirs. I wrote one chapter and an outline, Mr Simmons set about finding a publisher, and for the next six months I sat beside Carol's palm-fringed pool in Santa Monica with a cocktail glass and a tape recorder. It was a long way from reporting flower shows on the Kent coast.
We returned to London for the launch of Carol Comes Home and, by lucky coincidence some substance was added to the book's title when Carol was cast in Nell Dunn's play Steaming in the West End.
When I sat down the following year with Afdera Fonda, the ex-wife of actor Henry and the daughter of Mussolini's one-time envoy Baron Franchetti, her life that moved seamlessly from the drawing rooms of European aristocracy to the pools of the Hollywood stars lifted from the tape recorder like fiction and that's how I set out to tell her story, with setbacks and confrontations, with a beginning that draws you in and an end that leaves the reader satisfied.
I had found my style – and that's one of the ghostwriter's most important secrets: to tell the memoirs of your partner in their voice, but with your own style. It was a style I developed through writing Sex, Surrealism, Dali and Me, the story of dancer Carlos Lozano's long friendship with the surrealist painter Salvador Dali, and then in 2004 with Fatwa: Living With A Death Threat, the moving story of Jacky Trevane's daring escape with her two daughters across the desert from her violent husband. She has lived in hiding ever since after a fatwa was imposed on her by the Imam of Cairo.
For a biography to be compulsive, the story has to have fiction's elements of surprise, emotion, revelation and the extremes of human experience. The moment I sat down with Captain Ashcroft I had that writer's sixth sense that the mix was perfect.
Making A Killing by Captain James Ashcroft with Clifford Thurlow, published by Virgin, October 2006. This article first appeared in Writers Forum
