A children’s book I ghostwrote for Doris Barker. Instead of rating my own work, here’s the book and the lovely story behind it.
This is one of mine, in the sense that matters most to a ghostwriter: I wrote it, for an author who trusted me with something precious. Gators in the Soup follows Gate, a small but mighty alligator, on a magical adventure through which he meets a cast of curious creatures and makes lasting friends. It’s a warm, imaginative children’s story, and the tale of how it came to exist is, to me, as lovely as anything in the book itself.
So instead of reviewing my own work with a score, let me tell you where this one came from, because the origin is the heart of it.
How Gators came to be
The author is a woman named Doris. She approached me with her sister and family in a Panera Bread to talk about the project, and they were, all of them, lovely people, the kind you’re glad to have met regardless of any business. Doris was seventy-eight years old, and she’d carried this material her whole life: she’d kept notes of her dreams going back to her childhood, decades of them, written down and saved.
What she handed me, in effect, was a lifetime of her imagination, a large box of handwritten pages, her dreams transcribed by her sister, and what she wanted was for someone to shape that raw, personal material into a real novel a reader could hold. That was the commission: turn a life of dreams into a story.
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Shaping a life of dreams into a story
Working from that box was unlike any other project. Most ghostwriting starts from interviews or an outline; this started from the contents of a person’s dreaming mind, gathered across a lifetime and set down on paper. My job was to find the story inside it, to take the images, characters, and fragments Doris had dreamed and give them the shape, momentum, and coherence of a narrative, while keeping the spirit that made them hers.
Gate the alligator and his magical adventure grew out of that material, and building a children’s story from such an unusual and personal source was a real pleasure, the kind of project that reminds me why I do this work.
What is Gators in the Soup?
The result is a children’s adventure with a gentle heart: Gate is small but mighty, the creatures he meets are strange and friendly, and the lasting theme, fittingly for a book built from one woman’s lifelong dreams, is friendship and the connections we make along the way. It carries the sincerity of its origins. A book that began as a seventy-eight-year-old woman’s wish to make something lasting out of a lifetime of dreams could hardly be cynical, and it’s not.
It’s warm, imaginative, and made with care, and that’s what Doris wanted and what she deserved.
A note on the work
I won’t assign my own ghostwriting a numeric rating, because a number would be both immodest and beside the point. What I can tell you is that I’m proud of it, proud of the book and proud to have helped Doris realize something she had been carrying since childhood.
That part of ghostwriting never gets old: taking what’s precious and unformed in someone’s head or, in this case, in a box of handwritten dreams, and handing it back to them as a real book with their name on it. Gators in the Soup is Doris’s book. I was lucky to help bring it to life.
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