Anonymous is a New York area author and journalist who has assisted word-stuck C.E.O.’s and other top executives at several companies, including Citigroup. 

There have been times when I’d be sitting in a silent, cavernous, wood-paneled office or in a gilded corporate aerie designed by a starchitect, listening intently to a sonorous, self-confident voice describe a company’s brilliant strategy—or at least a strategy that could plausibly be described as intelligent—and I’d have a Jay McInerney Bright Lights, Big City moment. As I’d nod my head and peck notes on my laptop, I would type, “You are not the kind of writer who does gigs like these.”

But of course I am.

It’s possible you might recognize my byline. It’s somewhat less likely that you have one of my books on your shelves. But it’s very likely that you’ve heard my words spoken from the mouths of others. Yes, I’ve been a speechwriter and ghostwriter for some of America’s top corporate jocks: C.E.O.’s and very senior executives at very large companies, among them a well-known billionaire and a current central banker. The engagements have involved editing remarks as well as writing speeches, testimony, and even a memoir. Don’t expect me to name names, though—including my own. The speechwriter’s creed (and the legal documents he signs) guarantees confidentiality.

But my experience—and some of the experiences shared by other members of this tight-lipped fraternity—has given me a brief peek behind the velvet ropes.

Since chiefs and chairmen are used to having so much of their life handled by others, they’re not self-conscious about discussing personal details in front of people who are essentially strangers. And scribes frequently have to try to write remarkably personal material without much to go on. “In a recent speech, I had to write about the importance of faith to the guy’s marriage and about the first movie he and his wife went to,” reports a colleague, who had few clues regarding the chief executive’s theological views. How did it turn out? “They used what I wrote, no questions asked.”

Humor, frequently a staple of executive speeches, can also be tricky. Mark Katz, founder of the Sound Bite Institute, a one-stop shop for speechwriting and humor, was hired to do a video for Alan Greenspan’s 75th birthday, in 2001. Katz was going to interview former president Gerald Ford and thought it would be fun to do a bit with Ford talking about how the infamous Whip Inflation Now buttons constituted Greenspan’s major contribution to his economic policy. The effort to highlight Ford’s pathetic attempt to combat the economic malaise that gripped his brief presidential term never got off the ground. “Twenty years later, Ford was still not ready to do a joke about the WIN button,” says Katz, whose clients have included President Clinton and top executives at companies such as Walt Disney and Deutsche Bank.

Fortunately, given all the fancy footwork involved, we speechwriters are well paid for our efforts. Some sample fees from recent assignments: $3,000 for some basic after-dinner remarks; $12,000 for an annual-meeting speech that went through more previews, revisions, and rehearsals than a Broadway show; and a multiple of that last amount for some short-term script doctoring on a full-length memoir. I’ve heard unconfirmed rumors that a speech for the likes of Bill Gates can yield $30,000. These figures pale in comparison to what C.E.O.’s pay investment bankers and what lawyers take home, but they compare favorably with the rates I’ve been able to extract from magazine editors.

At times, speechwriters feel as though they should be compensated at a far higher level, especially since they’re often asked to do much more than polish the boss’s words to a glossy sheen. Several years ago, I was called in to a meeting with the C.E.O. and several top executives of a well-known information company. The chief was about to make a presentation to the board of directors on the company’s strategy for dealing with the rapid changes wrought by the internet. “Okay,” I said. “What’s the strategy?” A few well-coiffed heads sitting atop expensive suits looked back at me expectantly. After a few seconds, it dawned on me that they wanted me to provide them with the conceptual language to describe their multibillion-dollar company’s strategy.

Exposure and expectations in such rarefied C-level air can be hazardous to your ego. It’s important to remember that at the end of the day, you don’t get a byline: The words are spoken by others. In fact, a colleague of mine who had written about 50 speeches over 10 years for a boldfaced name-brand C.E.O. discovered this very painfully. Finally ushered in to meet the great man for the first time, she proudly found herself introduced as the scribe who had written a particular speech. “I’m sorry. You’re mistaken,” the media mogul responded. “I wrote that speech myself, and it’s actually one of the better speeches I’ve written.” Naturally, she was crushed, but she reminded herself of her ghostwriterly station.

Also, though very few C.E.O.’s have majored in English, many have particular ideas about how the English language works, even as they routinely commit all manner of venial and mortal grammatical sins. When a client stipulated that sentences should be no longer than a fixed number of words, I was reminded of the scene in the movie Amadeus in which Emperor Joseph II tells Mozart that “there are simply too many notes” in a piece of music. Mozart responds, “Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?” I swallowed my pride and dutifully counted the number of words in each sentence for the next draft.

At times, writing speeches for chief executives is a little like being a personal chef for people whose palate runs the gamut from macaroni and cheese to B.L.T.’s. They’re not interested in your soufflés and bouillabaisses. Corporate speechwriters must quickly disabuse themselves of the dream that they might pen some phrases for the ages, as their political counterparts do. C.E.O.’s may like to quote Winston Churchill now and again, but they generally resist reaching for Churchillian rhetorical heights. I wrote for one guy who routinely undercut his own narrative. During review sessions, when we’d get to the section where he was supposed to say something inspiring about the future and the company’s bright role in forging it, he would pause, look up, and say sardonically, “Okay, this is where we raise the American flag and do the Boy Scout salute.”

Scout’s honor. It’s the God’s truth.