Fiona’s Reviews > How Words Get Good: The Story of Making a Book > Status Update

In 1985 journalist Mark Schwartz agreed to ghostwrite a business book for Donald Trump. In a New Yorker article reflecting on his role decades later, Schwartz notes that in The Art of the Deal, ‘I created a character far more winning than Trump actually is.’ The New Yorker article explains how: ‘In his journal, Schwartz describes the process of trying to make Trump’s voice palatable in the book.

Although we don’t know for sure that Homer existed as a person, we do know that a society of poets called the Homeridae did. Some scholars believe that the name Homer was back-extracted from the name of this society — they claimed to be ‘children of Homer”, hence the name. Homeridae means ‘sons of hostages’, so some have theorised that they were the descendants of prisoners of war.

James Patterson, a prodigious literary figure and the world’s bestselling author (at least 114 New York Times bestsellers), sustains his output year after year by working with a stable of co-authors. His name looms large on his covers, but Patterson doesn’t actually write his books. Instead, he provides a detailed outline, then hires someone else to do the actual writing, while providing feedback to then.

Sentences and paragraphs in a book arrange the author’s meaning for the reader. The patterns the words follow once they are born, and the way we organise them, help them to convey something useful, interesting or emotionally involving.
When we begin the adventure of reading, we do so immersed in a cultural and sociological context – we experience how stories works as we learn to read when we are young.

Before the printing press, manuscripts were copied out by monks. And inevitably this method of producing text led to many errors and variations in each version. Punctuation, spelling and grammar weren’t standardised, and in classical manuscripts scriptio continua was used – which meant that there were no spaces between words!