Category: Uncategorized

December 2014, East London

Sharmeena’s father was surprised she had not yet returned home. The rain spattered against the windows and he imagined her without an umbrella, perhaps slipping into the mosque on the way. Finally, as he was preparing to leave for work at the restaurant, he rang her mobile. It went straight to a message in a foreign language. He called the police. A few hours later, they told him the language was Turkish and that it was likely Sharmeena had travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State.

Later, scanning her mobile phone bill, he could see that she had spent several days in Turkey before crossing into Syria – days during which the police were aware of her intention. He would wonder why the British police had not coordinated with Turkish authorities to stop his teenage daughter from crossing the border.

Two days later, the girls came to visit him. Kadiza, Amira and Shamima sat in a row on the sofa, their innocent eyes staring at the fleur-de-lis pattern on the brown carpet, seemingly bereft at the peculiar vanishing of their best friend. Sharmeena’s father quizzed them: ‘Come on, you guys were so close.’ But they swore up and down they knew nothing. ‘Really, Uncle, we had no idea. She was always on her phone. We kept asking her what was going on, but she said she’d tell us later.’

Two weeks later, Sharmeena called her father. ‘I’m happy here. I went by my own decision. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be okay,’ she said. He asked where she was, insisted that he would come and get her, no matter what. ‘No, you can’t come here, Baba,’ she said, tearful. Her broken voice made him cry too.

At Bethnal Green Academy, administrators called the girls – Kadiza, Amira, and Shamima, along with four others – into the office to meet with counterterrorism police. They were asked to answer questions about their best friend’s disappearance, and to give evidence, without their parents present. Were they criminals? Would they be put in prison? The girls, threatened and nervous, focused on speeding up their own departure and ensuring that no one got scared and ducked out of the plan. The police handed them letters to give to their parents. The girls, of course, pocketed them.

Less than two weeks after Sharmeena left, Amira, the popular Ethiopian girl, tweeted, ‘If you are three [in number], then let not two engage in private conversation excluding the third.’ The girls grew sloppy with their homework – until then always reliably completed – but their teachers didn’t notice. Because the school had only called the girls’ parents to say that Sharmeena had ‘gone missing,’ leaving out the crucial ‘to join ISIS’ bit, their families had no reason to suddenly grow watchful – to check whether their daughters were doing their homework, or to start monitoring their social media. Kadiza’s sister would often ask her if she’d had news of Sharmeena, but each time she repeated, oddly, ‘Well, I don’t know, I don’t know.’

Amira’s persona on social media, posted under UmmUthmanBritaniya and until then mostly concerned with fashion, soccer, and school, pivoted to talk of politics and religion. She and Kadiza, her bookish friend who excelled at school, shared images of injured Muslim children in Syria, and also Myanmar, where the plight of Rohingya Muslims – which the world would finally notice in 2017 – was already a focus of online Muslim activism. Amira was transfixed by the extreme violence that accompanied Syria’s civil war, a conflict that had raged without any outside intervention to protect civilians. She posted a quotation of a young Syrian boy’s last words before death, with the caption ‘This always gets to me.’ and an image of a Syrian toddler with a bowl haircut and eyes full of tears, eating dried bread. Throughout the Syrian war, both the regime and armed groups used and invoked violence against women and honour codes as a way of galvanizing support. Amira, listening to the rhetoric of one side, believed the jihadists were fighting valiantly to defend and protect the honour of women: ‘Hearing these stories of sisters being raped makes me so close to being allergic to men, Wallah,’ she wrote that winter of 2014.

Amira also grew more attuned to the vulnerability of Muslims living in the West and the Islamophobic hate crimes they endured. She tweeted and shared posts about a spate of events that occurred in one four-month period, stretching from November 2014 to February 2015: three Muslim students were murdered in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; shots were fired at a Montreal Muslim school; a Houston mosque was set ablaze by arson; a hijabi woman was thrown in the path of an underground train; online anti-Muslim vitriol was stoked by the film American Sniper, which celebrated a soldier who killed many civilians in the Iraq War. Amira’s tweets reflected genuine distress and bewilderment at popular culture, which seemed to construct a world in which Muslims were the perpetual aggressors, never the victims of violence.

The women who had already travelled to the caliphate echoed this in their online discussions. ‘The killings of innocent muslims is not just collateral damage tolerated by leaders of the west, but also directed by them,’ tweeted a woman called UmmYaqiin. These messages sometimes segued into droll encouragement: ‘Hijra. Just do it,’ and contemporary images that embraced extreme modesty and yet also craved the public performance of social media, like a photo of two muhajirat posing before a Syrian field, with face veils that didn’t even include eye slits: ‘My sister and I.’

 

 
The above is an extract from Guest House For Young Widows by Azadeh Moaveni, available from Scribe, £16.99. Guest House For Young Widows was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2020.

Image © Levi Clancy

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‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is one of the best-known and most widely analysed poems by John Keats (1795-1821); it is also, perhaps, the most famous of his five Odes which he composed in 1819, although ‘To Autumn’ gives it a run for its money. The best way to analyse […]

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Welcome to the first ever April PAD Challenge Countdown, in which Robert Lee Brewer shares a prompt and a poem (to get things started) in the 10 days leading up to the 2020 April Poem-A-Day Challenge. Let the poeming begin!

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Welcome to this first ever countdown to the April PAD Challenge! This was an idea suggested to me on Facebook by Mo Hurley, and well, it’s just a good idea with so many people locked indoors with little to do but read and write poems. So let’s get at it!

For today’s prompt, write a time poem. I don’t know about you, but I’ve felt in a time warp the past couple weeks—with a day feeling like a week (or even a month) and a week feeling much longer. So your poem can about that, or it can deal with time travel. Or write about being late, being early, or right on time. Heck, do a countdown. There’s no time like the present.

Remember: These prompts are just springboards; you have the freedom to jump in any direction you want.

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Re-create Your Poetry!

Revision doesn’t have to be a chore–something that should be done after the excitement of composing the first draft. Rather, it’s an extension of the creation process!

In the 48-minute tutorial video Re-creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will be inspired with several ways to re-create their poems with the help of seven revision filters that they can turn to again and again.

Click to continue.

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Here’s my attempt at a Time Poem:

“Present Tense”

I have a tendency to get worked up
about the future, to get choked up

about the past. But there’s no better
moment, in my mind, than this one,

in your arms, listening to the birds
breaking up the morning’s silence.

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Thomas Jefferson might as well have been describing how to break into ghostwriting when he wrote, “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”

In the summer of 2014, I quit my job to pursue full-time self-employment as an author and editor. Knowing that a majority of my income would likely not come from my books, I focused on seeking editing work.

In less than a year, I shifted my focus to ghostwriting, a professional avenue I thought would be forever closed to me because I simply didn’t have the connections. I knew no celebrities, political figures or rich business types, but I did have three key assets: experience, patience and luck.

This isn’t just my story either. In taking an informal poll of online connections who also ghostwrite books, common threads of experience, patience and luck wove through every story of how they first got paid to help other people tell their stories.

Why you should consider ghostwriting jobs

Before I cover the practical aspects of how to become a ghostwriter, let’s consider why you should add “Ghostwriter” to your writing services:

• You’ll get paid upfront. No more waiting on royalties like you would for writing your own books!

• It’s lucrative. With the right clients, you can earn substantially more than other writing services you provide.

• No need for marketing. Because your name isn’t on the book, you don’t have to do any marketing to sell the book, which means you can proceed to the next project ASAP. Authors who don’t enjoy marketing often see this as even more beneficial than how much they earn from ghostwriting projects. (Unfortunately, you will still have to market yourself to get clients, but that’s content for another post.)

• You can keep emotional distance. Because the book is not your own child, you’ll be able to see its strengths and weaknesses clearly, bringing a helpful perspective to the client.

• The subject matter is fascinating. When you choose the right clients, you learn as you write: about other people’s lives, their professions and industries you otherwise might not come across.

• It will help you write better. Ghostwriting consistently challenges your writing skills. If you’ve ever had trouble meeting your daily word count goals, try ghostwriting a book for a client who has already paid you!

With those considerations in mind, it’s little wonder that writers want to know how to break into ghostwriting, but the process isn’t easy or fast. Becoming a ghostwriter is equal parts patience, determination, experience, confidence, marketing, and, well, luck.

It’s that last part that most aspiring ghostwriters don’t want to hear, but it’s true — and we’ll get to why luck is a necessary ingredient in a moment.

How to become a ghostwriter

So how do you get started in this lucrative profession?

Here are some tips for how to become a ghostwriter.

1. Gain experience

Journal. Blog. Guest post. Write for publications like The Write Life. Send letters to the editor. Make insightful comments on websites. Self-publish a book (properly edited, of course). Create a family email newsletter. In whatever ways you can, write, write, and write some more.

And don’t forget to read. “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write,” Stephen King wrote. “Simple as that.”

Read high-brow, low-brow, classics, and today’s popular books. Alternate between fiction and nonfiction — nonfiction authors must know how to tell a compelling story. Read the best books on writing and storytelling, like King’s On Writing and McKee’s Story.

Put in your 10,000 hours of reading and writing. Earn the right to write for others.

2. Be patient

Ten thousand hours is 1.14 years, but that means you’d have to be doing that one single thing every hour of every day. Let’s say that five days a week you read for an hour per day and write for two hours per day, a generous assumption for most writers with full-time responsibilities outside of writing. At that rate, it will take you 12.8 years to become an expert writer.

My story witnesses to this Gladwellian opinion. I began to take my writing seriously as a freshman in college at the age of 18. Every one of my post-college jobs was related to reading or writing, but I also suffered serious doubts about my abilities and so let the blinking cursor blink for long stretches at a time. Sixteen years later, I was offered my first ghostwriting gig.

By no means do I believe myself an expert. Hemingway, who one could argue was an expert, said it well: “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

Patience doesn’t mean biding your time until the right person contacts you. Patience means constant practice until you’re ready for the right person to contact you.

3. Prove yourself…and then get lucky

Of the six online ghostwriters who responded to my question about how they broke into ghostwriting, every single one said they’d been working on smaller writing projects before “getting lucky” and breaking into ghostwriting:

• Mike Loomis started in multimedia curriculum development and book and product marketing before realizing he could help authors through offering ghostwriting services.

• Pat Springle wrote for two organizations who loved what he produced and helped others finish their manuscripts before launching into a successful 20-year career as a ghostwriter.

• Alice Sullivan wrote web and magazine copy for Country Music Television (CMT) during an internship before being asked by a major publisher to ghostwrite two books.

In my case, I proofread bills and laws for the Texas Senate, directed communications for a large church, wrote copy for a law firm, edited a content marketing website, and became a self-employed editor before breaking into ghostwriting through a fortuitous referral. At the time, I thought I was lucky to have earned the opportunity to write for someone else and be paid for it.

That job has led to two more direct referrals, which makes me feel even luckier to have been granted that first step into the world of ghostwriting.

But before getting lucky, I gained experience and practiced patience. The luck would never have been achieved without them.

This is an updated version of a story that was previously published. We update our posts as often as possible to ensure they’re useful for our readers.

Photo via GuadiLab / Shutterstock 

The post How to Become a Ghostwriter, So You Can Land Ghostwriting Jobs appeared first on The Write Life.

‘I would like to be on good terms with all animals,’ remarked the woman, to her daughter. They were sitting on the gritty beach at Sopot, looking out at the cold sea. The eldest boy had gone to the arcade. The twins were in the water.

‘But you are not!’ cried the daughter. ‘You are not at all!’

It was true. What the woman had said was true, in intention, but what the girl had said was true, too, in reality. The woman, though she generally refrained from beef, pork and lamb, ate – with great relish – many other kinds of animals and fish, and put out flypaper in the summer in the stuffy kitchen of their small city apartment and had once (though her daughter did not know this) kicked the family dog. The woman had been pregnant with her fourth child, at the time, and temperamental. The dog seemed to her, at that moment, to be one responsibility too many.

‘I did not say that I am. I said that I should like to be.’

The daughter let out a cruel laugh.

‘Words are cheap,’ she said.

Indeed, at that moment the woman held a half-eaten chicken wing in her hand, elevated oddly to keep it from being covered in sand, and it was the visible shape of the bones in the chicken wing, and the tortured look of the thin, barbecued skin stretched across those bones, which had brought the subject to mind.

‘I dislike this place,’ said the daughter, definitively. She was glaring at the lifeguard, who had once again had to wade into the murk to tell the only bathers – the girl’s own brothers – not to go past the red buoy. They weren’t swimming – they could not swim. There were no waters in the city in which to take lessons, and the seven days they spent in Sopot each year was not long enough to learn. No, they were leaping into the waves, and being knocked over by them, as unsteady on their feet as newborn calves, their chests grey with that strange silt which fringed the beach, like a great smudge God had drawn round the place with a dirty thumb.

‘It makes no sense,’ continued the daughter, ‘to build a resort town around such a filthy and unwelcoming sea.’

Her mother held her tongue. She had come to Sopot with her own mother and her mother had come with her mother before that. For at least two hundred years people had come here to escape the cities and let their children run wild in the public squares. The silt was of course not filth, it was natural, though no one had ever told the woman exactly what form of natural substance it was. She only knew to be sure to wash out all their costumes nightly in the hotel sink.

Once, the woman’s daughter had enjoyed the Sopot sea and everything else. The candyfloss and the shiny, battery-operated imitation cars – Ferraris and Mercedes – that you could drive willy-nilly through the streets. She had, like all children who come to Sopot, enjoyed counting her steps as she walked out over the ocean, along the famous wooden boardwalk. In the woman’s view, the best thing about a resort town such as this was that you did whatever everybody else did, without thinking, moving like a pack. For a fatherless family, as theirs now was, this collective aspect was the perfect camouflage. There were no individual people here. In town, the woman was on the contrary an individual, a particularly unfortunate sort of individual, saddled with four fatherless children. Here she was only another mother buying candyfloss for her family. Her children were like all children, their faces obscured by huge clouds of pink spun sugar. Except this year, as far as her daughter was concerned, the camouflage was of no use. For she was on the very cusp of being a woman herself, and if she got into one of those ludicrous toy cars her knees would touch her chin. She had decided instead to be disgusted with everything in Sopot and her mother and the world.

‘It’s an aspiration,’ said her mother, quietly. ‘I would like to look into the eye of an animal, of any animal, and be able to feel no guilt whatsoever.’

‘Well, then it has nothing to do with the animal itself,’ said the girl pertly, unwrapping her towel finally and revealing her precious, adolescent body to the sun and the gawkers she now believed were lurking everywhere, behind every corner. ‘It’s just about you, as usual. Black again! Mama, costumes come in different colours, you know. You turn everything into a funeral.’

The little paper boat that had held the barbecue chicken must have blown away. It seemed that no matter how warm Sopot became there would always be that north-easterly wind, the waves would be whipped up into ‘white horses’ and the lifeguard’s sign would go up and there would never be a safe time to swim. It was hard to make life go the way you wanted. Now she waved to her boys as they waved at her. But they had only waved to get their mother’s attention, so that now she would see them as they curled their tongues under their bottom lips and tucked their hands into their armpits and fell about laughing when another great wave knocked them over. Their father, who could very easily be – as far as anyone in Sopot was concerned – around the next corner, buying more refreshments for his family, had in reality emigrated, to America, and now fixed car doors onto cars in some gigantic factory, instead of being the co-manager of a small garage, as he had once had the good fortune to be, before he left.

She did not badmouth him or curse his stupidity to her children. In this sense, she could not be blamed for either her daughter’s sourness or her sons’ immaturity and recklessness. But privately she hoped and imagined that his days were brutal and dark and that he lived in that special kind of poverty she had heard American cities can provide. As her daughter applied what looked like cooking oil to the taut skin of her tummy, the woman discreetly placed her chicken wing in the sand before quickly, furtively, kicking more sand over it, as if it were a turd she wished buried. And the little chicks, hundreds of thousands of them, perhaps millions, pass down an assembly line, every day of the week, and chicken sexers turn them over, and sweep all the males into huge grinding vats where they are minced alive.

 

 
‘The Dialectic’ is included in Grand Union by Zadie Smith, published by Hamish Hamilton, £20. Grand Union has been shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2020.
 
Image © Angie Muldowney

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