Ghost writing, or my visit to Ebenenzer Scrooge

So I recently got a ghost writing gig, which was quite fun; that means I wore a white sheet and clanked chains did a bit of writing for a story for a story which wasn't my own, but was outlined by and will be credited to another writer. For the record, I have no problem with not being credited for the work, and I don't think it's lazy for writers to use them; one of my favourite series of books from yesteryear had a fair number of their entries ghost written, and all of them were outlined and edited by the credited writer/series creator.

This was for a YA sci-fi story, which I thought would be out of my comfort zone, but I found it a lot easier to write than I thought. I was given the preceeding chapter, so I knew what I'd be working from, and an outline in the form of a few paragraphs which I'd extend. What was interesting was that I was asked to tell Mr Scrooge he'd be visited by three ghosts finish the story, to write the ending myself. I thought this was quite a responsiblility, but of course I leapt at the chance.

Although it was only one chapter, I wanted it to be as good as possible, of course. This gave me a dilemma, of sorts - part of a good story is having fleshed out characters, but they weren't really my characters to add depth to, and I didn't want to contadict anything the main writer had in mind for his characters. But then I figured the story would be read over and edited as a whole, and homogenised, so anything not fitting it could be tweaked.

What I thought would be more of a challenge would be using the right writer's voice; J.R.R. Tolkien, Terry Pratchett and Lewis Carroll have all written children's fantasy for example, but if they shared writing chapters in a book it'd be a bit jarring as you move from each writer's contribution. So of course I wanted to capture the write voice, as the whole point of  a ghost writer is walking through walls that no-one can see them. So I read all of what I was given several times, and then bashed out the first draft, including the ending.

And an edit or two later that was that. I sent it to the client, who to my relief was very happy with what I'd written. :)