My ghostwriting experience was for a friend in an English course here at the UW. She writes poetry for the class and so it was my job to create a poem using her voice, style, etc.
I really didn't have too much trouble getting into the mentality of writing in a distinctive voice other than my own. I sort of imagined that I was writing a character, in this case my friend, and had to speak the way she would. I didn't have too hard of a time writing the poem either; I've taken a lot of English and am experienced with the conventions and forms of poetry.
The most difficult part of the process for me was mimicking her particular style. She writes very differently from me; our styles of poetry have almost no similarity. I wanted to rhyme and use meter while her style was totally free verse. Thus I was surprised by just how much she had to say when she looked over my original draft. I didn't really expect her to say much, but she pointed out different things she said would never come from her. One of the biggest things she pointed out was that I had let myself as ghostwriter come into the writing. I had used recurring symbols particular to myself to mimic what she had done, but as she informed me, they were completely alien to her.
I really didn't have a moral crisis as I worked on writing "her" poem, but I think that was because I knew all along she wouldn't be turning it in for credit or actually claiming it as her own. At the same time, ridiculous as this will sound, I didn't like the kind of poem that I had to write so I wasn't really concerned about not being credited for it. Maybe if I were really proud of my work, and then knew everyone would always credit it to someone else, I would be upset. I learned that I’m alright with bending the rules because I knew it was pretend. We’ll see if the same holds true for the plagiarism experience, which should be far more extreme.
I think my experience was fairly typical; my author described what she wanted and then told me to fix what she didn’t like. I think more extensive ghostwriting, on say a book length scale, would be far more challenging. Although it was kind of fun this time around, I would never want to do that in the “real” world.
