FANTASTIC REALMS
Create-a-ghost
As ghost story season beckons, tempting writers to create their own haunted scenarios, Alex Davis offers advice on developing spectres for your fiction
We’re into the height of ghost story season right now, with Halloween coming up and Christmas approaching on the horizon – so let’s get into the ‘spirit’ of things!
Of course there’s plenty to be said for shadowy landscapes, atmospheric description and an engaging human protagonist, but one thing that can sometimes feel a little underacknowledged is the importance of the ghost within the piece itself. And while there is a surface level to this – which we’ll look at first – there’s also a deeper level to developing a chilling ghost that we’re going to explore today.
Rules, rules, rules
Where better to start than the glamorous world of rules for your ghost story? We’re not worldbuilding in the sense that we might do for fantasy and science-fiction, but we are entering into the realm of the supernatural and what lies beyond known science. As such, we need to lay down the conditions by which our ghost is going to engage with the world. I’ve developed a mini-questionnaire below to get you started thinking about how your spirit might engage with their environment.
You might want to copy these questions onto a separate sheet in order to create the answers, so you can refer back to them later on.
• What is your ghost’s name? Could be its name from before it died, or a name given later on.
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