The Musical Ghost: An Interview with Kim Green Foster

By Tamoy Thomas

Kim Green Foster is a ghost writer living in Gainesville, Georgia, where she operates her freelance business from home. In almost twenty years as a writer, she has written music reviews for various urban magazines. Throughout her career, Foster has always been involved in the music industry, and it was this involvement that led to possibly her biggest break as a ghostwriter. She was commissioned to write the autobiography of American Idol winner Fantasia Barrino entitled Life Is Not a Fairy Tale.

How did you end up working with Fantasia?

Well, I have been writing for about twenty years or so. I had been in New York; I used to have my own business there. I was also in the music business for years; people knew me and knew that I was a writer, and because I’ve been writing about urban music for about ten or fifteen years, people kind of knew that it would be a good fit for me. And I had a lot of magazine articles as proof of my ability to translate what artists say.

So what was it like working with her?

She was great! She’s a very, very funny girl. She has a warm spirit. We met in Milwaukee, and I just had my laptop. I had set up all the questions in advance. I was basically silent for the most part. I asked all the questions, and she would answer and I typed them all in, and then based on what the focus of that chapter was, I would take her answers and put them into a narrative.

I thought you would have recorded everything as I’m doing now.

You know, I started recording in the beginning of the project, and then I stopped because I thought it was too distracting. I didn’t like the fact that you have to hold the microphone in a certain way so that it can be heard. And I think that if you’re trying to get somebody to open up and speak fluidly and really tell a story about their life, you don’t want to say ‘Oh, I’ve got to change my tape, hold on, my tape isn’t working right.’ I prefer to just listen and type. Since I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, so I’m really good at typing verbatim what people say.

Well, I’m not quite there yet.

Oh, of course not. It took me many, many years to be able to do that. And when I was writing for magazines, I would take a tape recorder with me for interviews, but the problem with that is, (and this is just more of a business insight that I got many years into my career) that time is money. So when you spend two hours interviewing people--or let’s just say it takes an hour to get there, an hour to interview the people and an hour to get back--that’s already three hours. Then you have to listen to the tape. So basically, you have to go back to that hour and transcribe what they said. That’s another maybe two hours of going back and asking ‘What did he say? What did he say?’ So when you’ve done that, you’re about five hours in, and you still haven’t written the article yet. Let’s say it takes you three hours to write the article, so know you’re eight hours in, and if you’re not getting paid by the hour, at the end of that project, you would have worked for about fifty cents an hour. I don’t mind spending eight hours on an article, but I’d rather spend eight hours crafting the article and making it great than wasting all that time on administration.

In my class, there some people who said that they wouldn’t have any problems ghostwriting a book and letting someone else take the credit, while others said they would have trouble parting with words they’ve labored over. What are your feelings about that idea?

All ghostwriters and all true writers always say that they don’t want to be famous so they say: ‘I’ll be a ghostwriter, that’s fine.’ But I think that being a ghostwriter and not getting any credit or not getting recognized for the work you do is a very difficult place to be. And I think that as a beginner ghostwriter, you don’t get credit or even royalties based on the sales of the book. So not only do people not acknowledge your work (and it’s a lot of work) but also since you are a ghost, the industry can’t recognize you because people don’t realize that it’s you who did the work. Now, there are ghostwriters out who are very successful, but that’s because they’ve been doing this for a while. After the word gets out in the industry that you’ve been doing this for a while and you do it well, then you start to reap the rewards of being a ghostwriter. But it is a difficult business because you do not get acknowledged, and in the beginning, you don’t get paid enough either

As a beginning ghostwriter, how do you let people know about you?

Well. Obviously, it’s difficult because when you sign a contract to take on a ghostwriting project, there is a statute of limitation as to when you’re allowed to come out and reveal that you did the work. So then it’s up to you to market yourself, and if you have an agent who is out there working for you, then he or she is telling people about you. It depends on who your agent is and who is behind you in terms of the projects that you do. And if you have a subject who is willing to talk about you, that makes it easier.

For example, I was lucky that with my Fantasia book, she actually talked about me in People Magazine and mentioned me on TV a couple of times. Although it didn’t bring in thousands and thousands of people, I just think that was nice for her to acknowledge me, especially since in the book she revealed that she didn’t write or read. It gave her credibility that she was able acknowledge that somebody else helped her with writing her life story.

Besides ghostwriting for Fantasia, what other projects have you worked on or are working on now?

I’m actually working on two projects right now. They’re both unnamed, you know, not famous people. One of them is not famous, but she used to work for People Magazine and it’s just kind of a life story for her. And then the other story is about a couple who have some unique circumstances in their marriage. Both people have contracted me to write their stories, so I’m in the process of doing interviews and writing the proposal for them to try to get a book deal. I’m writing the actual sample chapters and doing the demographics, which is the marketing stuff you have to do when you’re doing a book proposal. At the end of the day, what they will have paid for is for me to write the proposal and for presenting it to a publisher. I’ve got a pastor who has written a couple books and he wants to do another one. So I’ve been contacted to talk to him about that project. This whole Fantasia thing is finally coming to fruition, and people want me to do their books. I’m writing my own book as well, so it’s a struggle because I really need to spend time on my own project, but I have to make money.

How do you manage all these different projects at the same time?

Time management is a big issue. And basically, I just do one creative process at a time. For this project that I’m working on, I came up with eight interviews, and now I’m in the writing stage. For the other project, I’m still in the interviewing stage, and I’ll be interviewing them for another two or three months. I like to time it out that way so I wouldn’t be doing all the interviews at the same time and then start the writing at the same time because I think I’d get confused with too many voices in my head. When you’re ghostwriting, you’re speaking for somebody else; you’re channeling somebody else, so you really have to be in their head and have their mindset. You have to listen to them and their ideas, and you have to start thinking like them because you’re writing as if you were them. That’s why these two projects are working out because I’m not at the same stage with them.

So is it safe to say that the majority of the work that you are contracted to do is autobiographical?

That has been the case. I wouldn’t take on a nonfiction book, because a nonfiction book has to deal with a passion for a certain subject, and if that is not your passion, then it’s hard to make it sound real. I’m more of a creative writer, you know. I love hearing someone’s story and putting it all together into a complete story.

Do you do magazine projects on the side, or are you just focusing on your contracted work?

I haven’t done magazine work in many years. I worked for a couple magazines when I moved to Georgia, but they weren’t paying enough, so I stopped. Because I’ve been doing this for twenty years, so writing an article for twenty or fifty bucks is really not worth it. I did that at first to get my name out there in Atlanta, but the other problem is that, you know being a writer is very, very good profession, but it’s one in which you have to be aware of your limitations. I started out in entertainment. I was in the music business. I lived in New York, I worked at a record company. I had musicians around me all the time, I was out every night hanging out meeting people, but now I’ve grown up. I live in Georgia, I have a child, and I’m a single parent, so I can’t be out every night meeting people. And the whole entertainment business is about being out at the clubs, meeting people, making connections, and I can’t do that anymore. So I stopped even trying to write for magazines. And that’s why ghostwriting is a good job for me because I can do interviews during the day, I can write at nights. It fits my life now. As a writer, you have to look at your life and see what suits it.

Do you do freelancing for other companies or individuals?

I do some marketing, consulting, and editing. Also I’ve had clients who have asked me to edit their books that they have already written. I did that for Sherry Winston, a classical flutist. Since I have that musical background, I tend to have a lot of people come to me from the music industry.

I just wanted to know about the beginning of your career, specifically what attracted you to the ghostwriting field or writing in general?

I’ve written my whole life, and I’ve always been a reader. I went to private school in New York my whole life and you had to read your summer booklist. When I was probably in the fourth or fifth grade, I read maybe a hundred books that summer. My teachers were stunned. I was a voracious reader. I loved books and I’ve always wanted to be a writer. But I think the moment when I really decided that I wanted to be a writer, I was probably in the seventh or eighth grade. I had a writing teacher who was very, very strict. But she was brilliant, and she really gave me such a love of words and books. I was getting C’s in her class. So I began meeting her for after-school sessions and she would explain to me: “That sentence doesn’t make sense, that sentence doesn’t say anything, or that sentence doesn’t have any meaning.” And I remember thinking to myself: Woooowww! I want to learn how to write sentences that have meaning. And from then on, I wanted to learn how to master the idea of communicating with people and letting my words say everything they have to say. I studied advertising in college. I was a copywriter for many years. I wrote advertisements for radio and TV commercials. It was a very lucrative field, but it still wasn’t what I wanted. So I just kept writing about people and interviewing artists and getting into music because music is my other big love. So entertainment and writing worked out beautifully, and that’s how I got a career in entertainment writing.

With regard to contract negotiation, how do you decide which project is worth your time first of all, and once you finally decide, do you have a contract that you present to them, or do they have stipulations?

Well, when I owned my own business I had a contract with signatures and promises and all kinds of things. But I think that since I’ve become more of a looser freelance writer, I tend not to do too much contractual work and it’s probably not that smart. But the work that I do comes from referrals from other people, and through my Website and so I’ve done away with a lot of the contractual stuff because writing is such a fluid thing. And it’s hard to write, and sign off on a promise, because basically, you’re promising that you’ll love it, and they’re promising that they’ll pay you. This is a very difficult position to be in because most people say that they’re writers when they’re not. Let’s say you worked on a project for six months and they don’t like what you’ve written, then where are you with the contract? They might not want to pay you. I just think contracts put you in a very bad position. I just think you have to be really careful with what kind of projects you’re doing. You need to have a comfort level with your client. They really need to believe that you know what you’re doing. After that, the need for the contract kind of goes away, because then you’re basically saying to somebody: “I’m gonna take your life and tell it” That’s a very personal thing, and making a contract is very hard. I do have some guidelines. For example, if I charge let’s say $6,000 for a project, I will say “You have to give me dollars as deposit.” And then when I’ve written the first draft, another $2,000. And then when it’s all over, the balance. They’re at least paying for your effort, and it leaves a little less room for them to say: “I don’t wanna pay at all.” But in the beginning of my career, I used to say: I don’t want people to pay unless they really love it. And that was me being very naïve. My father stepped in when I was running my business in New York. I had tons of clients, but no cash flow. He asked me if I took deposits, and I said: “No, that’s not artistic.” He was the one that said: You are in business; you have got to get deposits. And so that little wisdom has taken me a long way.

After you’ve finished a project, are you responsible for finding a publisher, or do your clients they take care of that themselves?

The two clients with whom I’m working right now have contacts in publishing, so they’ll take care of that. And any other client I take on, I would never take on the task of getting the book published. That’s not my area of expertise, because I’m a writer; that’s what they hired me for. They usually have it worked out, and some of them plan to do self-publishing.

You mentioned earlier that you were working on your own book, what is it about?

It’s sort of a memoir--a story about a woman and her life in the music industry, sort of similar to me, and how she goes through a rough period and comes out of it a stronger person. It’s a woman’s story. It’s called Hallucinations. I’m very excited about the title. I’ve been working on it for over a year, and it’s finally at a place where it needs to be worked over one more time. You know I’ve been submitting from time to time, and I’ve gotten some suggestions, so I have to respond to them and go back and work on it.

So what advice do you have for up-and-coming writers, whether they be ghostwriters or other types of writers?

My advice for you as a writer is to really understand that this is the most difficult profession; it’s a grueling profession, but I also think that it is a very rewarding profession. If you write something that you think is beautiful, it doesn’t matter if it’s a Website or a novel. I think if you love words, and you’re committed to making words beautiful, then you’re on your way. But I think it’s so important that everybody understands that being a writer is not glamorous; it’s not easy and people are very critical. It’s a lifetime pursuit, and you can be good at it and get better; you can also be good at it and get worse. It’s just a changing, evolving pursuit, and I think the best advice is for a person to read all the time. Because words are our business and we have to be aware of how words are being used. When I listen to rap music, for example, I listen to the words and the tone that they use. All of those things inform how I would write a hip-hop character, or a stiff political character, or whoever it is. And as a ghostwriter, you really have to listen to people and the terminology and phrases they use. You need to be intimately involved in writing, words, and language. And I think if a person is ready to commit to that, then they’re on their way, but you can’t be “sort of” a writer. If you’re really a writer, you have to be heavily engaged in words, language, and listening to people. So I guess that’s my advice. Two things: Understand this is not easy. And this is not an easy fix. People are not going to say, “Oh you’re really great, you’re gonna be rich next year.” It’s not like that. Look at me. I’ve been writing for twenty years, and I just finished my first novel.

Great! Leave it to me to choose the most difficult profession.

I wish I could say “Oh, it’s great fun!” And it is fun in its own sort of internal way, but it’s not easy. I’ve been writing commercially for twenty years, and now I just want to hide out and write. And it just depends on you and what you decide to do. Being a ghostwriter is fascinating because you get to listen to people’s stories and make them real for the world. I’m really enjoying these two projects that I’m working on right now because they’re very emotional. They’re telling me their intimate secrets and trusting me with their stories.

For someone just coming out of college, how do I bring attention to myself?

The best way to get started is to have written. You need to have clippings of your work whether it’s from your school newspaper or the pizza restaurant menu, do it. Take every writing gig you can get. And the other thing is just being able to identify what you are most interested in because your writing will reflect your interest. One of the biggest mistakes you can make (and I’ve done this several times earlier on in my career) is to take on a project that you have absolutely no interest in. It’s going to show in your writing, and people will say “you don’t know what you’re talking about” and they’ll be right.

So, basically, knowing yourself is the key to your success.

You’re absolutely right. You have got to be aware of what you care about and what matters to you.

As the conversation drew to a close, Kim and I talked about school and the possibilities of my beginning a career writing for local magazines or newspapers. Then just before we said our goodbyes, she asked me where I was from. When I told her I was from Jamaica, to my surprise, it turned out that Jamaica is Kim’s favorite vacation destination. So our conversation was once again rekindled for more than twenty minutes as we exchanged thoughts about our favorite Jamaican foods and attractions on the island. During the course of the conversation, Kim also advised me to use my Jamaican culture to my advantage and incorporate it into my writing. This and many other pearls of wisdom passed on by Kim Green Foster will be helpful to me and other aspiring writers.

Posted with the permission of Tamoy Thomas and Kim Green Foster. © 2008 Tamoy Thomas.