“Ghosts are never invited to launch parties. Usually we are a shame, as a lover at a wedding, "he says the ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) hired to round out the memoirs of a former British prime minister in the film The Ghost Writer by Roman Polanski.
But ... how do real ghost book writers perceive your work? Is it difficult for you to accept that notoriety is taken by the client? And can they adapt to any identity when putting themselves in the shoes of the author?
“I don't have any kind of misgivings about the writings. For me it is very clear when I write for myself and when I write for someone else. In that sense, anonymity is comfortable for me and I prefer it. Especially now that The Logic of Damage is in bookstores under my name. Its publication caused those two aspects of writing to be completely separated”, Vítolo considers about his volume of short stories, in whose flap it is read that the author, in addition to being a screenwriter and teacher, is a ghostwriter.
“The interesting thing about the work is the possibility of playing with other voices and other ways of counting. Like everything in life, there are more interesting jobs, people and projects than others, "says Vítolo, who started ghost book writing about six years ago, after developing written content for social networks and web pages.
The great danger of ghost book writing, Vítolo believes, “lies in the hours stolen from writing itself. They compete in screen time, writing and reading. They tend to be worlds so different from the ones I explore in my stories that they are thematically and creatively separated, but there is a limit to the number of characters one can type per day”.
The "Horse Ghost" writes about four books a year. "As a ghost I wrote soporific books, and I also wrote others that were quite good, but I never felt emotional commitment to any of them," he says. And it puts on the balance that “if there is no fame for 99 percent of good writers, what fame can there be for those who hire a ghostwriter. There is only my desire to get paid and the client's desire to have their book written”.
However, it happened to this writer, proofreader and ghost that one of the books he wrote on request was awarded. “When 'the author' uploaded the news of the award obtained to Instagram, more than satisfaction I felt a displaced strangeness. As if I were the third in contention seeing her lover strolling happily holding her husband's hand. But I turned the page: the ghost book writers are very much considered as priests who confesses, listens, forgives, and forgets”.
While he had not published his own books, Maqueira tried to leave marks of his true identity. “It was always a fight with the editors. I got to preface the book that I had written under a pseudonym with my name and he took the opportunity to talk about me, obviously. I remember that prologue lasted five minutes, they totally blew it up”, he remembers and laughs.
But it wasn't easy for him either once his own literature started circulating, because “obviously the ghost books sold better than mine. It was tremendous, because I saw how the gualichos book sold better than the one that I had thought of high literature, "says the host of the radio program Narraciones Extraordinarias.
However, Maqueira highlights that the experience of being a ghost helped him understand the writer as a worker. “It is hard for me to imagine myself as a writer who is in his dome, letting the muses arrive, writing his masterpiece. That type of writer I don't believe it at all. I fervently believe in the writer as a worker. The issue of vindicating the rights of those of us who write as workers undoubtedly came to me from all this experience as a ghost”, points out the founding member of the Union of Writers.
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