Fellow writers, share your ghostwriting horror stories

[estherrandell]

Ever since I made 25 bucks writing about the advantages of sleeping without underwear, I've taken my writing career rather seriously. I've now made over $40,000 in just over two years on Fiverr, doing what I love best. 

As writers, we've all had some cringeworthy moments, but a few of us have had scary movie episodes. One that stands out for me was when one client insisted that I write about the feminine side of Jesus. I mean, where in the world would I find that? The more I tried to shift their focus to portraying Jesus' compassion, love, and care to character traits attributed to femininity, the more I got shut down. They then said, "God is a woman, find supporting scripture to back it up."

Ladies and gentlemen, I still have nightmares. I just might never recover. What are your ghostwriting horror stories? I'd love to hear them.

[melanielm]

The oddest situation I've ever had is when the buyer wanted me to hand deliver a physical folder of printed articles to them at their house... halfway across the country. I thought it was a joke at first, but they were quite adamant that the $20 or so they were paying me could absolutely cover air fare.

[vickiespencer]

Just the thought of writing for someone who is judging my writing makes me cringe. When I was a newer seller I made good money writing business letters and letters of complaint. However, once my proofreading gigs took off I paused those gigs.

 

Praise go to all of you sellers who are willing to put themselves out there and write. 🙇🏻 🙇🏻‍♂️

[katakatica]

I have a gig that is VERY specifically for interactive stories. It's in the name (and the description.) Even the format of the description copies the style I use to write it.

Since I don't have any other general story writing gigs (that's not horror) people like to use that gig to order stories that are NOT interactive. 

Now this is fine (although some people actually order nonfiction through it which I do not write at all and is really strange) but... 

These people usually forget to tell me that they don't want an interactive story format. So... I'll write out my three different endings and several choices and they are like "what is that?"

(For the record every single time I write to them to specify which format they want.. they say the interactive format is fine). It's... Very confusing!

Another story is...

The reason I have a brainstorming gig is because someone used my plot gig for unlimited brainstorming. (Twenty plus hours). Only to decide I "did not have enough original ideas" and they wanted to go a different route. Was a cancellation I was glad about.. I did mess up with not discussing expectations - they wanted more internal goals for the characters but I focused on world builting since there was not much world going on but still!)