(Note: on both this site and the one for Second Shore Publishing, I will occasionally post responses to writing prompts I give to the Second Shore family of authors. The current one: Is there a story, theme, character, experience, or question that keeps finding its way into your writing? Why do you think you keep returning to it?)
Ghosts. Now there’s a subject folks have been using for story fodder since writing came into vogue. Think of Shakespeare and Dickens and Stephen King. Think of Hamlet’s father, Marley in his chains, or the twins at the Overlook Hotel—just a few of the ghosts, other worldly presences, and visitors from the grave in fiction. Since my childhood I have always been fascinated when a member of the Spirit World grabbed my attention or made an appearance to me either in print or film or oral history, and for seven decades that feeling has never left me.
Since 1998 I’ve published a host of novels, and looking back on their plots and themes and characters, I find there is a long list of appearances by ghosts or their occult brethren showing up consistently in my writing, even when I never planned on such occurrences to take shape in my initial outlines. Whatever the reason, the bottom line is I can’t seem to escape my personal literary supernatural guides, even if I tried.
In my first novel entitled Once in Love with Amy, the title character Amy was already dead and spoke to and visited the other characters from her grave. So yes, I was off and running. Since then I have had a ghost dog named Hobo visit his former master to help him cope with the real world, a beautiful lady ghost who visits a bartender after closing time each night, a man killed by accident lingering around the earth before departing for the Hereafter simply to make things right before he goes, a former lover who walks through a man’s imagination who he makes love to regularly, a host of graveyard denizens who tell their stories from their graves, a faithful dog who goes to heaven after his death but comes back and visits his earthly family from time to time, and a man whose neighbor is convinced he has died but can’t explain why the man is sometimes seen outside his old house at night walking his dog. These are but a few of the ghosts and spirits who consistently grace my plotlines, and I have often wondered why it is I need them to be a part of my stories in some form or another.
Perhaps when it all comes down to it, I have no real sense of what is happening before my own eyes in the real world where I am supposed to be garnering some truth to pass on to my readers. It could be that I need a ghost or a pooka or a boggart or some such member from the other side who’s experienced in the ins and outs of life because they’ve been there before. They’ve had the benefit of being a Monday Morning Quarterback as far as the propensities of life are concerned, the time to sit back and take stock of what has gone on before them, and these ghostly guides are able to encapsulate and understand the sometimes strange movements the planet takes in its spinning. They are able to relate to me those facts and happenings within the living on Planet Earth. Facts and happenings that I am unable to comprehend the who, what, when, where, and whys of.
Maybe the citizens of the Great Beyond have wisdom bestowed upon them because of their past experiences of erring or being successful at daily living and are able to pass their knowledge to me, a mere novice at this comprehension/wisdom scenario of the ages, and their facts and details are necessary to create a story. Or maybe the ghosts I employ in my writing are references I consult to make certain I am not veering off the fictional interstate and heading off into a culvert where my characters and plots and themes don’t have the first inkling of how the world really moves around and goes its way gathering up knowledge to take to the grave with them. I am convinced that these ghosts who visit me in the process of storytelling come forth to lead me down pathways I wouldn’t have known were there without being shown the way.
I confess I’ve even seen a few of these spirits in my own life, or at least I’ve imagined I have, maybe in much the same way I encounter them in the throes of a manuscript, when I’m stuck on a fact or a face or a place I’ve never been before, and that is when my otherworldly amigos show up and tell me where to follow and what to remember, to go with them a while and learn from them precisely what is real and what is not. At this point I’ve learned not to question their existence but rather rearrange the story some and allow my writing associates to show me which way the plot goes from here.
Ralph Bland is the author of seventeen novels and four collections of stories. His work includes Stars Rain Sun Moon, Lockhart, and Lamb White Days. Ralph is a graduate of Belmont University, married with a daughter and three very spoiled dogs, and on numerous occasions likes disguising himself as a normal person. When not coercing himself to write he spends his time suffering over the heartbreaks of the Vanderbilt Commodores basketball team, lounging in his backyard with his adorable dogs, or tinkering with his 1949 Wurlitzer jukebox, trying to determine why one day it works and the next day it doesn’t, knowing full well that because he is a mechanical idiot he will never know the answer. A lover of Universal monster movies and British sports cars that don’t run, he is the proud owner of perhaps the South’s largest Frank Sinatra audio collection, as if that has anything to do with the price of tea in China. His most recent novel, Pretty Boy, is downloadable for free here or you can purchase it in eBook or paperback formats here.
Krin Van Tatenhove - Words & Images 