“You write it and they get all the credit?” my friends gasp. Yes, if they pay me enough. In the secret language of ghostwriting, I’m called “the writer” and my partner is “the author,” and a “with” credit usually pays more than an “and” credit. But complete anonymity pays best of all. (Well, it’s not complete anonymity: ghostwriting contracts almost always stipulate a kind mention of the writer in the acknowledgments — though not necessarily for writing. At times, these may read rather cryptically, as in: “This book would never have been written without...” )  Even when I explain all of this, I detect an undercurrent of sympathy, as if people were comparing me to the Debbie Reynolds character in “Singin’ in the Rain,” warbling my heart out behind the curtain while the harpy-voiced Lina Lamont gets all the credit. This pity follows from the unspoken judgment that I really should be singing in my own voice. After all, a writer with even a little talent must have a novel on the hard drive, right?  I just don’t think this happens to audiologists.  Doing something people regard as art — writing — for cash, and in someone else’s voice, seems suspect in a world where we’re exhorted to pursue our passions and express our true selves.  Timothy Ferriss, the author of “The 4-Hour Workweek,” urges readers to eliminate tedious, time-consuming employment (or at least squish it into one busy weekday morning) and to devote the rest of their time to their true passions. In his case, that means motorcycle racing, kickboxing and tango competitions.  One of his secrets to success, he says, is outsourcing humdrum tasks (for example, writing-related research) to assistants abroad. Why compromise by doing “work for work’s sake,” he asks.  As someone whom people outsource to, I feel rather frumpy and old-fashioned reading all of this. After all, ghostwriting casts the compromises of cash versus passion in stark relief. Sure, most people suppress some aspect of themselves in the office. But the whole point of ghostwriting is to suppress my voice in order to mimic someone else’s. I defer my own passions to write about the author’s. For all my advice to my clients, in the end, it’s their book.  These lessons haven’t come easily. In one project, I wrote that the author wished that her mother, instead of a nanny, could have cared for her kids. “That’s not how I feel at all!” she fired off in an e-mail message. (Now that I’m a parent myself, I understand.) I argued strenuously to cut the final chapter of one book; ultimately, however, it won the most praise from reviewers.  SOMETIMES, suspending your own ego isn’t such a bad thing: Compromise in the work world can bring compensation, too — beyond the kind that pays the bills. Ghostwriting has let me climb inside other people’s lives and forced me to respect choices I wouldn’t have made myself.  I’ve learned to listen more carefully, and to never, ever assume that I know how people feel. These skills improve my work when I’m writing under my own byline, too. So I’m skeptical when I hear sunny exhortations urging workaday slobs like me to chase our dreams and to forgo (or condense) the evils of the office and all its compromises.  Of course, I want to pursue my passions and to write in my own voice. But I have other passions, too: Two of them (my children) go to day care and one (my husband) loves adventure travel. If I refused to make compromises among them, we’d all be shortchanged.  For me, writing in another voice, about other people’s passions, has helped me to understand a lot about my own and how to create balance among them. So I’ll continue my scandalous sideline. In the end, maybe it really is a best career. At least until my clients start outsourcing their memoirs overseas.  A version of this news analysis appears in print on , on Page BU1 of the New York edition with the headline: Expressing Passions (Just Not Your Own). Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
When I mention that I’m writing a book for a doctor or an executive, I sense a certain discomfort, as if I’d said that I write term papers for a living.