I had an email from a budding young writer asking if I had any advice on how to write a good Halloween ghost story. Here’s what I came up with, maybe it’ll be useful for other students who have to write one, or to a teacher or parent who wants to make one up.
1: Create a likeable character who will be meeting the ghost. This could be the person that the reader identifies with. If we see the story through this person’s eyes and we feel they’re like us, we’ll be scared when they’re scared.
2: Create an interesting ghost. Usually it’s a child who died in that house or an old man or women or a soldier. A ghost could be anybody or anything—it could be the ghost of a dog, or a now extinct animal, or any kind of person.
3: Give the ghost a reason for what its doing. If it wants to frighten everybody, why? If it needs help, what unfinished business does it have on earth? Try to come up with something unusual. It could be funny—maybe the person died in the middle of watching a movie and won’t able to rest until they find out how the movie ends. Unfortunately it’s not available on DVD and nobody can remember the ending…
4: Think about interesting ways that the ghost could be scaring people. Saying boo or just materializing or moving stuff around is so old school. What if it haunts your character’s iPhone and sends nasty messages to all their friends? Or maybe it’s a ghost kid and it can take control of your main character’s father and mother and make them act like children.
5: Give your character a good personal reason for wanting to help the ghost. How is what the ghost is doing causing a problem for your character? Make sure that something terrible (or terrible in a funny way if you’re writing it as a comedy) will happen if your character fails to help or get rid of the ghost. Figure out a way to put a deadline on it—if the plan doesn’t succeed by midnight, the terrible thing will happen.
6: Come up with a clever solution for your character to use. Again, make up something a little different from the usual finding a hidden object in the attic or saying a spell. If the attempt to carry out the mission is dangerous, so much the better. The ghost doesn’t have to be the only scary thing in your story.
7. As you write, remember that you can get scares without resorting to blood and guts. Let's say our character is a girl named Leah. She goes to bed for the night. She feels cold so she closes the window. She gets back into bed, turns out the light. Her feet feel cold and then the cold creeps up her body in the darkness. She wonders if she’s coming down with the flu. And then it’s her ear that gets very cold, but it’s as though the cold is just near her ear, very near…and she hears a whisper: “Leah…help me.” Now, you can add some details to make that work much better, but I hope you can imagine that whisper could be just as scary as seeing a ghost with a sword or a knife.
8. See if you can come up with a twist to the ending. Instead of ending on the ghost’s problem being solved, for example, maybe then your character gets the ghost to get even with a bully (of course you’d have to include the bully earlier in the story).
Naturally this is only one way to write a ghost story. You could also write it from the viewpoint of the ghost. It could be about a ghost who has their own Facebook page and haunts people who don't "friend" it--maybe it needs to collect 100 Facebook friends by midnight on Halloween or else it will never be allowed to rest. Or… you get the idea. Your turn!
Want more ghost story writing tips? Here they are:
Here’s what Susan Hill who wrote the scary stage play, “The Woman in Black” suggests: http://timetowrite.blogs.com/weblog/2007/10/how-to-write-a-.html
Here’s what Joe Hill, writer of “Heart Shaped Box: and “Horns” advises:
http://timetowrite.blogs.com/weblog/2010/10/how-to-write-a-great-ghost-story-part-1.html
And here’s what Neil Gaiman (“Sandman”) has to say about scaring kids:
http://timetowrite.blogs.com/weblog/2010/10/how-to-write-a-great-ghost-story-part-2-_neil-gaiman-says.html Edit
(If you’d like more help with writing, see my book, “Your Writing Coach,” published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other book sellers.)
