Exactly a year ago, I wrote a post called From Ghostwriter to Author: My Journey.
At the time, I thought I was writing about a transition I had already made, but looking back, I think I had barely started it.
I had spent years writing professionally for other people, slipping into their voices, working to briefs, hitting deadlines and learning how to make myself invisible on the page. That is part of being a good ghostwriter. The finished work is not supposed to sound like you. Your job is to understand someone else’s voice well enough that nobody notices you were ever there, then I started trying to do the exact opposite.
I started putting my own name on things, and apparently, once I started, I became slightly… prolific. Over roughly the last year and a half, I have written five complete manuscripts. Five. I have to keep saying that because I’m not entirely sure my brain has caught up with it yet.
There is The Wild Rover, the first book in The MacKenzie Chronicles, followed by Mairi’s Wedding. Then came Signed, Sealed, Survived, Home to Brae Hill and Masked at Midnight. And because apparently five completed novels were not enough fictional people living rent-free in my head, I currently have another two works in progress: Bond of Starlight and Signed, Sealed, Desired.
I have gone from writing other people’s books for a living to having an increasingly alarming number of my own… and I love it. Writing your own novel in private is one thing, deciding that you genuinely want other people to read it is another beast entirely.
Over the last year, I’ve queried manuscripts, received rejections, received encouraging feedback, rewritten, cut, restructured and occasionally stared at a chapter wondering whether deleting the entire thing and becoming a farmer might be easier. I have hired beta readers and handed over manuscripts that, only months earlier, existed solely between me and my laptop. That is a remarkably vulnerable experience.
There is a specific kind of terror involved in sending someone 90,000 words you invented and then asking, essentially, So… did any of this work? But I have also discovered how valuable that outside perspective can be.
Other people see things you cannot see when you have been staring at the same characters for months. They notice the moments that make them laugh, the characters they fall in love with, the scenes that hurt, the places where they desperately want you to get on with it, and occasionally the moment where you realise that something you thought was incredibly obvious has, in fact, been understood by absolutely nobody.
The main thing that has probably been one of the biggest surprises of this whole experience is that I’ve connected with so many other authors, writers at different stages of their careers, traditionally published authors, indie authors, people querying alongside me and even people who understand the peculiar emotional rollercoaster of refreshing an inbox when you know perfectly well there won’t be a new email because you checked it thirty seconds ago.
There is something wonderfully comforting about discovering just how universal some of this is: the excitement, the rejections, partial requests and even the conversations about agents, publishers, tropes, covers, characters and whether the thing you have spent six months writing is actually brilliant or whether you have simply developed manuscript-induced Stockholm syndrome.
I’ve also started investing in the worlds I am creating by hiring artists for commissioned work for my books, and begun seeing people who existed only in my imagination turned into something tangible. That has been unexpectedly emotional. There’s a very strange moment when an artist sends you an image and you realise:
Oh. There they are.
These stories are no longer just files hidden away on my computer. They are becoming books with identities, imagery, readers, feedback and lives beyond me… and that is both absolutely terrifying and incredibly exciting.
As I started becoming more confident in my fiction, I noticed the way I wrote elsewhere, particularly on this website, I realised I was still hiding like a Ghostwriter. My book reviews were structured, polished and informative. They were very much the woman who spent years being paid to make words perfect. The problem is that I do not actually experience books tidily.
Nobody who knows me would believe for a second that I finish a ridiculous five-star romance, gently place the book down and announce:
The author demonstrates an effective command of romantic tension.
No.
Sometimes I finish a book and need to stare at a wall, or go for a walk holding my baby. Sometimes I become emotionally attached to a fictional man who would be an appalling life choice. Sometimes I’m reading monster romance and the sentence I actually want to write in my review is:
Dear reader, the muffins.
And that is fine, that is me. So the reviews are changing too.
I’m keeping the structure because I still think it’s useful. You’ll still be able to find the themes, audience, narration style and all the information that helps you decide whether a book might be for you. But around that structure, I want to talk like a reader again, I want to tell you when something made me laugh, I want to talk about why a sex scene worked emotionally rather than simply informing you that the book contains explicit content.
And if I’m reviewing monster erotica involving wings, tails, tentacles or some anatomical situation that requires a diagram and perhaps an engineering degree, I reserve the right to have fun with that too. Professional does not have to mean personality-free.
Ghostwriting gave me an enormous amount: it taught me discipline, how to finish things, how to work through the point in every manuscript where your brain announces that the entire book is terrible and you should never have been allowed near a keyboard. I’m bringing all of that with me.
What is changing is where I want to put it, for a long time, my own writing happened around my professional writing, but now I want my own writing to be the centre. That’s scary because there’s much more of me attached to it.
A ghostwritten project can be judged as work, my novels contain my humour, my interests, my obsessions, my characters and some surprisingly revealing evidence about what apparently goes on inside my imagination. There ‘s no disappearing behind somebody else’s name, but that’s also exactly why this feels so exciting.
I have five finished manuscripts that did not exist before I decided to take myself seriously as an author, and I have two more growing beside them, I have beta readers, I have artwork. I have author friends and writing communities I would never have found if I had stayed comfortably behind the scenes. I have characters I adore, fictional places I genuinely miss when I’m not writing them, and more stories clamouring to be written than I have hours in the day. Most importantly, I’ve stopped treating my own writing like the thing I’ll get around to once everybody else’s work is finished.
I don’t know exactly where any of these books will end up, I can’t control that part. What I can control is whether I keep writing them… and, apparently, the answer to that is a fairly emphatic yes.
A year ago, I thought becoming an author meant learning how to put my name on my fiction, now I think it means something bigger: allowing myself to be visible in all of the novels, the reviews, this website, in the ridiculous jokes and emotional ramblings. I spent years learning how to disappear into other people’s voices.
Now I am finally learning how much fun it can be to use my own.
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