Autumn is the time for story ghosts
Don’t you love autumn? Dew frosting the grass, fog swirling beneath street lamps at night, the countryside awash with colours. If June is wide open with the promise of summer, then November turns inward, is dark and mysterious. It’s the time of ghosts roaming the streets for Halloween and ghost stories on your bedside table — and the perfect month for me to tell you about my very own story ghosts.
I discovered story ghosts when I was a few drafts into my first novel: that for every character who actually makes it onto the page for good, countless others were only allowed to briefly exist before vanishing again, thus becoming ghosts in their own story.
Invisible characters in my novels
In first drafts of Summer of Secrets, for example, Maddie had a guardian called Hugh Allingham. Hugh was young, handsome and crippled by childhood polio; he swept up the Summerhill drive in a carriage the week before the war and discovered Victor’s true nature while falling secretly in love with Georgiana. Early versions of Chloe included a friend called Bella, a brilliantly spunky girl with purple hair and outrageous schemes for escaping Aidan. Addie, in My Mother’s Shadow, originally worked in a big restaurant called Chez Migalle, bullied by histrionic head chef Bouvier. She also had an additional sister, a (rather humourless) lawyer called Frederica, and an uncle, who masterminded the search for Phoebe.
Every story has its ghosts
All of them — and many more — were cut because they didn’t serve the purpose of the story. And yet, in a funny way, a part of them will always stay behind, too. When I look at my books now or remember the writing process for other people, I see both, the proper, bona fide characters that went to the printer, and all those faded story ghosts that drift along the shadowy edges of the book’s fictional universe. And when I read a book by other authors, I often now wonder about their story ghosts. What other characters hover, unseen, above the ones we see? What other twists and turns did the story take before it became the one I’m reading? What are all the things that were lost but are still part of that story in the writer’s imagination?
