by Jayden Harlow

Created on: November 07, 2008

The first thing you need to understand about being a ghost writer is that it's unlikely to ever be a fulltime job. Are there people who make their livings as ghost writers? Absolutely - but they tend to have either highly specialized skills or excellent contacts in a particularly lucrative area of writing. More often than not, they have both. Probably the most well known ghost writer is Carrie Fisher (yes, Princess Leia), who was a very successful ghost writer and script doctor before turning her hand to writing her own novels. But, for the most part, ghost writing is simply a facet of a freelance writer's overall career; some jobs are credited, while others are ghost-written. That said, not all freelance writers are strong ghost writers. Here are a number of skills you'll need if you plan to make ghost writing part of your professional repertoire.

1. VERY strong writing skills. How do you know you're a strong writer? Well, don't put too much stock in what your friends, family or teachers tell you. If you are an exceptional writer, your employers will repeatedly pull you off of other projects to write. Companies generally don't like keeping specialist writers on the payroll, so they dip into the company talent pool whenever possible. And the stronger you are, the more significant the project will be; response letters to customer complaints are generally at the lowest end of the spectrum, while marketing materials and business proposals are at the highest.

2. Corporate communication experience. Corporate communications are the materials that come from the company as a whole, rather than from an individual person. Examples might be an annual report, an in-house newsletter, or a policy document. Writing these kinds of materials requires that you adopt the "voice" of the company, which is the first step in developing the skills needed to ghost write. Companies have different "voices"; for example, a conservative business that provides services to the federal government will have a much different written tone than an interior design consulting company. As a corporate communication writer, you need to recognize and emulate that "voice" so that everything you write sounds like it's coming from "the company" rather than an individual person. It's the same skill you'll later use to emulate the "voice" of the person you are ghost writing for.

3. An exceptional talent for observation. Ghost writing requires that you put on someone else's skin, so to speak. To do that, you

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