A Delicate Balancing Act

Something we’ve discovered about ghost stories from working on ours: they have ghosts in them. Who knew? And ghosts can be scary! But not too scary, at least not all the time…

As we get into a finer level of detail about everything, we discover that our ghosts must be around in the background of a lot of scenes that we didn’t really envision as “ghost scenes” and where we don’t want them to interfere. But we do want the ghosts to matter, to be an important element of the story world. A genuine menace at times. So, a lot of our recent conversations have dealt with resolving this apparent contradiction. And it’s turning out that we aren’t really trying to have it both ways, but just that our earlier, broader outlines of the story didn’t require us to dial things in like we must now that we’re getting gritty with it.

There’s a line we need to walk between too much chaos and not enough. That balancing act is what creates the feeling of suspense for the reader.

The question of how easy it is to reach our main story location is another whose answer seems to depend on when you ask us. The difficulty of the journey is occasionally a plot point, but it can’t be so arduous that no one would ever be able to get there. Again, conversations just need to get more granular so we can establish what it is about the terrain that raises challenges, so different characters can have different experiences without it looking like we’re changing the rules on them.

A writing partner is someone who’ll catch you if you fall off the tightrope.