The Limits of Friendship
Most of my friends know that I write. This is especially the case with my long-time friends from my motorcycle group, The American Flyers Motorcycle Club (AFMC). I started twenty-six years ago writing a trip story and have done one for every ride I have taken since. People love to read about some story they are a party to, so the stories get lots of kudos. I also think that over the last thirty years I have gotten better and better at writing stories. This does not come by magic, but the same way in which one finds one’s way to Carnegie Hall, through practice, practice, practice. I write every day and take all the risks that come with that since the best writing is about what one knows and that means who one knows. No matter how I try to disguise my stories, people read through the veil and know if I am writing about them and invariably someone takes offense. It is the collateral relationship damage that is inevitably a part of being an author. Anyone who says this need not happen has probably never been a regular writer. I believe it comes with the territory and while I work to minimize the offense and damage, the humor I find in every-day interactions is simply too good to exclude and that means someone’s ox inevitably gets gored, at lest a little bit.
I have now written three books for friends from the AFMC and they all have their own story attached to them. One is off my screen at this point as it was less a writing and more a rewriting exercise. I negotiated for no rights or credits to it and have simply not heard what has become of it. The other two are well in process of publication and the stories about them are rife with things that, if told in great detail, would invariably get me into hot water with the co-authors or their spouses. One involved a series of ribald stories from the co-author’s youth which I faithfully and creatively told with a flourish. That was met with plenty of yuks of remembrance, but on second thought, there was a concern that the reading of these risqué tales by wife and daughters might not comport with the upstanding image the co-author had worked hard to cultivate in his family. He asked that I cleanse the stories, which I did, but at some not insignificant cost to the humor of the text. The truth is that that particular book should not concern the family because other than about five paragraphs of input from the co-author, most of the stories are composites of purely fictional creation with only the scantest of reality as their base. That fact, in and of itself, tells you a lot about the writing of that particular book. I got the slimmest of concepts and facts and got the gist of the narrative arc, but had to fill in so many facts that were not available from the co-author that it would be more accurate to call this a piece of fiction rather than a real-life story. I don’t think any of it is unbelievable and these things probably happened more or less this way to somebody in those days, just not to the co-author specifically.
The third and biggest project I have undertaken is a work of career biography. It is a business memoir, a project that began more than four years ago. It took me perhaps six months to write the first 160,000 word draft based on 234 pages of scribbled notes from the co-author. Very little of this book was made up or even hyperbolized and these stories all happened to the co-author. This was almost the opposite problem of the other project in that there were almost too many real facts that had a tendency to get in the way of the narrative arc and certainly no dearth of reality. The struggle here was between this being a true memoir (with all the personalities met and side roads taken in a normal life) and a commercially viable business book with relevant lessons for the reader based on real-life situations lived. This co-author lived a very energetic and ribald life of his own and his spouse and children both knew about all of this and more or less celebrated all of it. But what a family finds interesting in a life is quite a bit different from what an airport book-buyer wants to wade through. In the end, I suggested that the co-author publish one commercial version and privately publish another unabridged family version where everyone and everything got included.
Overlay all of these dynamics on the changing landscape of the publishing business and what you get is a real saga all its own. We have worked with a literary agent who has lent his thoughts to the work product and now to a publisher who is lending, yet again, their input to the book. This input ranges from copy edit commentary about punctuation and capitalization all the way to in-depth philosophical thoughts about business strategies espoused or described. The editorial comments range from valid observations about redundancies and flow to inane comments about turns of phrase with which they may not be familiar (mostly due to an age gap or business experience gap). Title and cover are always big focal points where everyone has a point of view. Everyone seems to want their title input to be front and center to the point of making seemingly inane suggestions just to show that they have added value. The use of a titular synonym to get one’s two cents on the board seems like more of waste of time than anything. As for the cover, the first rule is not to entertain any cover art done by anyone who hasn’t read the book in its entirety. It is always amazing to me that someone can suggest cover art without a solid understanding of what the book is really about, and yet, it seems to be more the norm than not.
In the case of this book, I have rewritten it four times now and that does not include minor adjustments made by the co-author, his wife, his other close friends, and, of course the legion of editors who have poured over the text. It has gone from a book of 160,000 words (500+ pages) to 145,000 words (480 pages) to 97,000 words. (323 pages) and now to what I think is a near final commercial version of 82,000 words (275 pages). That seems like a very hard path, but the truth is that the beauty of being a ghost writer is that you are less invested in all the facts of the subject’s life and cutting is easier than one thinks. The really hard work came in the first rewrite when there was a challenge by the editor to the chronological development approach. That led to a “hook the reader into every chapter” approach to the flow of the story and that rewrite took me two solid months of work to do. The cut from 145,000 to 97,000 words was relatively much easier and took me a few days since it was about identifying large blocks of text to eliminate. That came from several whole chapters in the co-author’s life that seemed less impactful to me and the elimination of a great deal of the family personalization that one wants in a memoir but can ignore in a business book.
The funniest part of the process has been the struggle to keep my name in tact on the document. Every time a new editor takes a crack at a reformatting of the book, it comes back with the author’s by-line and without the co-author’s “with” byline. That has happened with text drafts and recently happened with cover art drafts. Naturally, I always comment and push back and am assured by the co-author that the “with” will not be lost.
A mutual friend from the AFMC who is also an author on his own has asked me why I do this. He acknowledges we are all friends, but still, why subject oneself to it all. My only answer is that these are my friends and despite all the challenges and work, I like doing things for my friends…and I like to write. I am proud of the work I have done on all three projects. I don’t expect much in financial rewards or even in kudos from any of it. It is a labor of love and a reaffirmation that there are no limits of friendship.