On Friday 20 September, we welcomed Mr Andrew Crofts to the School to deliver a talk as part of our Nicholls Lecture Series.
By Jack V, Sixth Form student
Andrew is an author who has published more than a hundred books, many of which have become international bestsellers. At one stage he had four books in the Sunday Times bestseller list simultaneously. However, what might strike readers as unusual, is that his name rarely appears on the front of the books. This is because Mr Crofts is a freelance writer or ghostwriter.
By his own admission, Mr Crofts set off to London in the 1960s with little more than a mediocre grade in English Literature, inspired by the high life he believed he could find as a novelist. Whilst his first novel was rejected, it was following further rejections that he had an epiphany and realised that writing was just a skill like any other (likening it to carpentry to be exact) and this was a realisation that was to change his life.
With this in mind, he tried to find as much work as possible writing. At one point, Mr Crofts described how he wrote over one hundred letters in a week to magazines and other publications, desperate to find work as a writer through any means. Success eventually came through the field of travel writing. However, it was when he was approached by a charismatic salesman asking Andrew to write for him, that the idea of ghost-writing was sparked for the first time.
At one point, Mr Crofts described to us how he had written the story of a Birmingham woman, keen to share her experience of how her sister and she had been sold in Yemen by their father. This emotional and extraordinary story could not have been written by the women who had experienced it, highlighting perhaps the greatest strength of ghost-writing: the fact that it allows stories to be told about those who, for whatever reason, are unable to tell them themselves.
Whilst Andrew shared with us many more stories, which both shocked and entertained, one of the most resonant quotes of the lecture was, ‘rejection is never personal’. Mr Crofts explained to us how he had had to get used to rejection in his profession, since books got rejected by publishers much of the time, and that the ability to persevere is a quality that is requisite in any career or passion pursued.
Upon asking him whether he had any desire to express himself in literary fiction, he told me 'no'. Mr Crofts enjoys the unpredictability of ghost writing, the excitement of discovering a story that needs to be told. And he has certainly achieved his objective of avoiding the mundanity of the 9-5.
From writing for the winner of Big Brother (who would only dictate his stories to Andrew from his bed) to Basil Brush, he has ghosted for a wide range of subjects, although perhaps my personal favourite was the time when Mr Crofts was gifted to an Asian Billionaire and required to stand alongside a giant cake whose structural integrity was a local supermodel.
I would like to thank Mr Crofts for giving up his time to speak to the Sixth Form and for sharing with us just a few of the interesting tales he has been asked to tell over the years.