A Story of Ghosts

 

I wanted to give a little writing update, something I haven't done in a bit. I've been working on a Middle Grade ghost novel for over a year. It's a complicated story and I've been consistently interrupted by life, but have continued to work on it nonetheless.

This week, I had a bit of a breakthrough. I'm currently writing a pivotal scene where the action is going to turn. There are two schools of thought when it comes to writing these types of passages. One is to get the idea down and push through, then go back and make it perfect. The other is to suffer through carefully and make sure the tone and details are solid. I fall into the second school of thought. For me, getting the tone right here will set the style for the rest of the story. Getting it wrong can lead to the wrong trajectory and ruin a story.

The other night I was perfecting an encounter and once I nailed it, a burst of what was to come hit me. I love these kinds of breakthroughs. The trick is to harness them into momentum.

When Reality and Fiction Meet

As I mentioned a little while ago, I've been working on a new manuscript for the past two months and have shockingly been making progress on it. It's a story set in my own house, using elements from my own life, which is always the easiest place to start and embellish.

The idea for the story came to me over the winter. I was lying in bed and had nearly fallen asleep when I heard two pronounced footsteps in the attic above my head. They were not the sounds an animal would make. They were human sounding footsteps. Only two of them. Two footsteps that started and ended in the middle of the room. I would've thought I was imagining it except that my faithful cat, who was lying beside me, also looked up at the sound, confirming that the footsteps were not some half-dream hallucination.

This past week, I finished writing a scene where a bird delivered a message to a character in the attic. The attic in the story is my attic. Oddly enough, two days ago, a bird mysteriously showed up in our attic a day after completing the scene. The bird was one meeting the description of the bird in the story. There seemed to be no way the bird could have ended up in there, but my wife clearly saw it at the window when she was outside. Even more puzzling, when she went to free it, it wasn't there.

These are the kinds of events that give me the encouragement to continue. It's the kind of thing that reminds me how art, and the creation of art, exist in a strangely connected way to life that is a mystery worth exploring.