Hi writers,
When I hit what I thought was the peak of my Hollywood career, I was working with a CIA agent on a spy show. It was literally my dream. I got to pick his brain about the conspiracies that were actually true and write TV around them. And I was disillusioned anyway, because I wanted to spend my time on my own original work instead of being work for hire on other people’s shows.
I told Joanna Penn that story on The Creative Penn Podcast. She’d read Write for Money and Power before we recorded, and she wanted to know how you walk away from a dream like that, and what you walk toward. The episode is out now:
It’s also on Spotify, and Joanna’s show notes and a full transcript are on her site.
🎬 Dreams in the hands of gatekeepers
Here’s what I was running into. I had put my dreams in the hands of gatekeepers, and when you hand over that power, you’re left without agency. You find yourself working for free, or doing work for producers that you never signed up for. People dangle your dreams in front of you to get you to do what they want. I saw it happening to me, and to the writers around me.
So when 2020 shut everything down and the writers’ room I was in moved to Zoom, I took it as the opening I’d been waiting for. I traveled the world, ghostwrote memoirs for Olympians and CEOs, and had the kind of experiences that became my first novel, The Nomad Detective.
🗝️ Why the word “power”
Joanna told me that one word in the title was what caught her eye, and she asked me why I chose it. Writers get told we’re not allowed to want power over our careers. Gatekeepers discourage it, and so does the culture. We’re supposed to be starving artists who are grateful for anything that comes our way, because we get to make our art. I wrote the book to argue the opposite.
Something is shifting, though. Writers are starting to be treated as creative entrepreneurs who own the whole thing, the writing and the marketing and how the book meets the world. It’s why authors like Brandon Sanderson publish independently, and why Taylor Swift bought back her masters. When the people at the top of their game outgrow the gatekeepers, the old systems come into question for the rest of us.
🌍 How ghostwriting fed my fiction
So many novelists started out as journalists, because some of the best inspiration for fiction lives in nonfiction. Memoir ghostwriting turned out to be the perfect primer for me. I never would have been flown to Vienna to sit down with an entrepreneur who changed the direction of his whole industry and ask him what it was like to grow up in Austria, or to live a life that size. I got to understand people through a completely different lens, and pay the bills while I did it.
That’s also where Let Me Be Your Ghost came from. When I tell my nonfiction readers I have a romantic thriller coming out, I can tell them it’s inspired by my memoir ghostwriting work, and the bridge between the two makes sense.
🖋️ Start with the thing you’re most excited about
Joanna asked where a multi-passionate writer should start on Substack. The best advice I’ve gotten, and the advice I’ve watched work for other writers: start with the thing you could write about forever. For some writers, that’s what it’s like to get up and write before work. For one sci-fi author, it was an incredibly detailed piece on fountain pens, which ones write best on which paper, and which ones leak on an airplane.
In the niche comes the universal. Write what you love, then package it so a reader knows what to expect from your headline and your About page. You can contain multitudes. You just have to walk people through them.
🧰 Also in the episode
Why Kyle and I run Make Writing Your Job as a community: the job board, the grants, contests and residencies list, the author interviews, and perks like our Scrivener discount
The 3 income streams in Write for Money and Power, and why each one feeds the next
Why self-publishing shed the vanity-press label for good
The line I keep coming back to: we are writers, and we should be writing first. Everything else is noise.
Let Me Be Your Ghost, the romantic thriller that came out of those ghostwriting years, comes out November 18. Preorder it in any format and I’ll send you How to Write a Memoir, the guide I wrote as a ghostwriter and have never published, for free.
Thank you to Joanna for having me, and for reading the book so closely. If you write books, her podcast is where the mechanics of selling them get talked about openly, which I told her on air I love.
-Amy