It’s hard to find a topic Danelle Morton hasn’t covered. She’s had a diverse career: From her early days as a The New York Times copy clerk, to the Associate Bureau Chief of People Magazine and co-author of fifteen books (including four bestsellers). Last year, Morton worked with former DNC chair Donna Brazile to release “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House.” She is also the co-author of “Finishing School,” a guide to finishing the writing project you can’t seem to get done.
12th Street sat down to chat with Morton about ghostwriting, overcoming fear, and the art of listening.
STREET: Let’s talk about your transition from journalism to ghostwriting. When you started your first book, Managing Martians, you’d already been a journalist for twenty years. What was it like to shift from investigative reporting to writing other people’s stories?
DANELLE: Actually, some of my best writing training was at People. At People, you’re writing about celebrities many of whom you don’t know much about. I didn’t know much about Celine Dion but was assigned a cover story: the first thing you do is you make a timeline of things that happened in her life. Things like moves, births and deaths; all of those changes are fraught with emotion. Then you do a timeline detailing her emotional life. By putting those two timelines together, you get a very clear picture of how a person reacts to struggle.
I got my first contact with an agent by covering a celebrity wedding. I was writing about the hottest wedding planner in Hollywood. I met a woman there who was working on a book with him, and she said, “You could write books. I’m going to set you up with an agent.” I messaged the agent, and then this book fell my way. It was actually a natural fit for me. I was surprised to find that with all the reporting I’d done at People, I had a really clear vision of how to deconstruct the story and where to start. I felt like I found what I was meant to do in writing.
STREET: How did it feel taking on that very first book? Any anxiety?
DANELLE: I wasn’t frightened at all. I felt she had a great story to tell and I was confident I knew how to tell it.
It was twenty years ago, and the Pathfinder had just landed on Mars, right on the 4th of July. It captured the imagination of the entire country. Everyone was surprised to find a woman had been the manager of the project. She was kind of a tough character, this Spocky-strong woman from Oklahoma with a Dutch Boy haircut. It wasn’t really her story in a way, what the reader really wanted was the story of the rover. So it was a balancing act between her personal narrative of moving up through NASA, and the technical issues of designing this machine that had never been even envisioned. They dropped the thing from the sky surrounded in air bags and it bounced along the surface of Mars until it came to a resting point. Then the bags deflated, it opened up like a flower and the rover went off. It’s almost poetic.
It had to be written quickly, as these things are. I think it was four months.
Right after that, I got another book. So I had to make a choice. I couldn’t keep taking leave from People, so I took the leap. I could make as much money [writing books] as I could working a conventional job, and it’s fun. I wasn’t fascinated by celebrity breakups. I was interested in the story.
STREET: When you’re working on a memoir, say with Donna (Brazile), how do you decide where to start?
DANELLE: For Donna, it would’ve been easy to open at the moment she is on the podium receiving the (DNC) interim chair–that’s where the hacking story begins. In reality, I think a lot of us felt damaged by the last election. Surprised, certainly. In some ways, the book was also about her relationship with her old friend, Hillary Clinton. So it opens with her looking at her cell phone (months later) when she sees Hillary’s name–a call she has stopped expecting to receive. Traditionally, in the days after the election, candidates thank everybody in their immediate circle. Donna got a call from Joe Biden, Tim Kaine, Barack Obama, but not Hillary.
That was a great place to begin. It’s something that links the reader to her. We’ve all looked at our phone, seen a name and thought “Wow. Why now?”
Then, we see it was a betrayal, because Hillary didn’t call until February. You think, what happens next? We know this is a story about the DNC hacking, but it’s also an emotional story. Take a well-known figure like Donna, and she’s honored to help her friend get elected. She steps up to be the chair of the DNC because she helped get Barack Obama elected. Then everything that happens ends up damaging their relationship. So there’s that story, too. People focus on the two controversial mentions of Hillary, but they didn’t get a larger emotional story of what happened to Donna, who was trying her damnedest to help her friend get elected and got thwarted because of all of the craziness of the election. These were not only moments of high emotion, but also echo to something else in the book. It sets up the book in that it poses its own question.
When I write somebody else’s memoir I want to to make sure the first page has juxtaposition of emotion and action. That’s going to make people want to read the book. They might walk directly to the cash register, and that’s what you want.
STREET: When brought on to a project, you’re taking on a huge amount of material. What is your process from start to finish?
DANELLE: My job is to believe the individual I’m working for. Even if I may have judged the situation differently, or taken a different action. My discipline is to completely meld with their point of view and try to see everything from that perspective. With my first few books, I was a lot more combative. It was almost like it was my book. Of course, I’m expending a lot of energy to get as a good of a book as I can make it, but it’s not my book.
So, it’s incredibly important to hear the other person in order to develop their trust. There’s nothing more delicious in the world than to know that you have been heard. Somebody sitting across from you saying, “I believe you, and I want to hear your voice.” My ego gets smaller as I listen for their true voice.
Once you align the emotional timeline and the actual one, I think there are moments when you can question the decisions that they’ve made, but in the beginning my job is just to hear them. I’m also assembling a lot of other information, interviewing their close friends and family.
In Donna’s case, I interviewed 35 people because it was more complex. Since we were tying her story to the election, it had to be accurate.
But really–just start. Don’t worry if it’s right place to start; there’s no wasted words. Maybe this paragraph is going to go halfway through the book, maybe it’s the ending. It doesn’t matter.
STREET: Do you deal with any perfectionism around getting a person’s story right?
DANELLE: No, I think that’s their responsibility. Read the book, and tell me where I got it wrong; I’m not going to fight you on it.
I’m putting juxtapositions together that the other person may not have considered before. If I’ve gotten it right, it illuminates things. Otherwise, if I’ve said something that is off, you know way off, it’s also useful information: It means I wrote based on my own interpretation of the person. I’m not defensive about my mistakes. I think it’s important as a writer to drop that, and not get bogged down fighting somebody over their opinion. If it’s useful to you, take it on, and if it’s not, let it go. I know how a remark about your writing from somebody can derail you for an unconscionable amount of time.
STREET: In Hacks, you really capture the cadence and energy of Donna’s voice. After spending years developing your own voice, how do you capture someone else’s?
DANELLE: I think it has a lot to do with listening–and specifically for the sort of unique ways they speak. The book needs to reflect the rhythms of the way they construct a sentence. The kind of things they observe–not the kind of things that I observe.
There was an argument about one of the chapter titles. Donna’s in this conflict with the Hillary campaign and they’re not giving a straight answer and she’s really frustrated. She’s got the Hillary campaign on speakerphone and she says, “This doesn’t sound like a negotiation. Gentleman, let’s put our dicks on the table. Because I’m gonna bet mine is bigger than yours!” and I thought, “Wow! That’s a catchy chapter title.” Because I’m a journalist, I asked everybody who I knew was in that room. Did she really say that? That’s what you’re looking for. Some people thought it was too risque, but in the end we used it because it really did reflect the way she speaks and it draws attention to that chapter.
If you were to think of somebody you’ve talked to for years, you could probably think ways in which they construct the sentence that’s a little off. What you’re looking for is not perfect grammar and elocution. It’s something that’s a little mangled. Something that’s distinctive enough to spark the reader’s attention.
STREET: When reconstructing a story, how do you decide what is directly quoted and what’s exposition?
DANELLE: It’s a choice. I like it to use to spark up the page. Like when somebody says something, and the response shows a certain amount of conflict. Sometimes the editor will ask for more dialogue because you’re gone on too long with the prose. It’s a matter of rhythm. You want to spice it up and look for an opportunity where what they’re talking about could be uniquely set in another voice. With Donna’s book, you have page after page of their narration. So you look for a moment where you can liven it up, or you’ve got a really great line.
STREET: In Hacks, there’s a lot of suspense; each chapter ends with a nail biter. How did you develop that kind of pacing?
DANELLE: It just seemed natural because they were discrete events. Like the day Hillary collapses, and Donna wonders if she’s going to have to replace her as a candidate. With such dramatic events, it’s easy to find a cliffhanger. For instance, take the Hacker-house chapters. This team of elite security expert hackers from Silicon Valley come to the DNC to protect it from incursions by the Russians.
They’re arrogant guys. They think, “It’s going to take three days to fix this problem,” then they walk into the computer room at the DNC and 90 seconds later somebody pops their head out of a cubicle and says “We’re under attack right now!” They opened up their laptops and get right to work. I thought, “That’s a cliffhanger!” You stop right there. The entire chapter makes it so that the reader believes the problem will be easily fixed, but it’s a much bigger problem. That theme underlies the entire book: every problem is actually a magnitude bigger than anybody would have ever thought.
STREET: Assuming you have to connect with a person to write their story: How do you do that in cases where you don’t agree with their politics, or perhaps even their morals?
DANELLE: Last year I wrote a book with Peggy Grande, the personal assistant to Ronald Reagan for the last ten years of his life. I had my reservations; I do not support Reagan. I instantly adored Peggy, it was clear that her honesty and work ethic would make it fun. I found it absolutely fascinating to work with her. It was almost like I was exploring that strong element in American culture that I didn’t know much about. Also because she’s a great human being. She learned how to write while working with me; by the end of the book she was writing the chapters on her own. It was a very sincere collaboration.
It’s like writing a character inside a novel. You have to hear them, or else they won’t be believable. They have a worldview, a reason, and a story. Allowing yourself to appreciate that really makes it easier for you to build a fully-formed character even if you disagree with that person in some ways.
STREET: Has anything changed in the way you approach co-writing?
DANELLE: I think the fundamental thing I’ve learned is that it’s not my book.
Listening is a practice that requires a lot of discipline and not a lot of words. The last book I wrote, when I looked at the transcript I noticed the most frequent question I asked was “And then what happened?” That’s not a very insightful question, but it’s a great question if you’re holding this emotional container for them. If you’ve created the feeling that whatever they say is taken seriously, then all you have to ask is “And then what happened?”
In the beginning I was much more like a journalist. Like it was an adversarial relationship, I thought “I’m going to get the truth because I have all the tools!” I had an agenda. I wouldn’t say any of those things now. Maybe some of them are still true, but my feeling now is that I am a servant of the story. Part of being a servant of the story is to cherish what that person has to say, and to aid them in sharing a more complete version than they ever told. Sometimes, when people talk about their past they have that “oft told story” kind of feel. They grin at you during the expected laugh lines. That’s what you have to break it up: What really happened?
…And then what happened?