Margie Thomson discusses how she became a ghostwriter

Margie Thomson / Photo/Simon Young

Margie Thomson is one of the country's most successful ghostwriters, having produced 15 books for psychic medium Kelvin Cruickshank, musician Stan Walker, mental health advocate Sir John Kirwan and others. She is also the author of the highly regarded Whale Oil, published in 2019.

I fell into it partly by accident and partly because I had been wanting to take on the challenge of a book project. I'd been a journalist for a long time and was always interviewing people but I wanted the chance to take on an exponentially longer project and to think about voice and all the poles that make up a novel.

The people who you are writing for are alpha personalities, they are very busy and they are often not very available to you, so it's more of a creative exercise than you might think.

When people are talking about themselves, they don't necessarily speak very coherently or chronologically; you can't use very much of what you gather. It's manicured and restructured and shuffled around, but you're keeping key phrases and insights. You spend so much time with this person, immersed in their life, and you are writing as if you are this person - which is really weird when you think of someone like Stan, who is a 29-year-old Māori guy and I'm a late-50s Pakeha woman - but you just have to imagine yourself into their shoes. Maybe my superpower is that I find it relatively easy to imagine myself in the lives of others.

I have written two books for John Kirwan. The first was All Blacks Don't Cry. That was a classic model of the kinds of books I seem to have done, someone who has a story that is of genuine public interest, but they have a value-added thing that they want to share or offer the public. I still feel really proud of that book and it's gone on having an impact. It's interesting as a marker of how we have all changed — now so many guys have come out and shared their stories of struggling with depression, it's becoming much more normalised. But he was the first and it was a really courageous thing to do because there was no guarantee he was going to get a good reception. He can't go out the door, still, without people lining up to tell him their problems.

It is important to like the person, I think, to make for a successful book. It's almost like Stan has transcended the musician thing and has a taonga status. He's shared a lot of his life with people. JK used to talk about that — I've made myself vulnerable to people and they have been vulnerable right back — and I think Stan is like that too. People feel able to be themselves with him.

My interviews with Stan were very long, the first one was six hours. [We were] channelling the violence of his childhood. I used to say to him at the end, are you okay, do you have someone to be with tonight? He was always more excited in a way that he had the opportunity to express stuff that he hadn't been able to express before, but me, I would wake up the next morning and often feel quite down and I realised that's because when you're listening closely to someone you are having an experience and that's the thing about these people that I tend to write about, they have been through a lot.

I remember Lance O'Sullivan saying some people are extraordinary and we tend to look at them as role models and why can't we all be like them and no we can't — some people are extraordinary. Stan, there's nothing to indicate he should even be alive, let alone full of forgiveness and aroha. He has got an incredible character.

The hardest thing as a ghostwriter is stepping back. You feel all the time you are writing the manuscript that it's your book, but it's not your book. You feel so aligned with the story you are retelling and you feel a sense of ownership for having drawn a particular sort of story out of a person — and then it goes out into the world and it has nothing to do with you.

As told to Eleanor Black