I have had a supernatural story in my head for years and years. I have tried starting it dozens of times but no matter what I do, or which character I write as, I just cannot get it right. The story itself is clear as clear can be - and has a great twist in the tail. It even has a title. But it just won't let me write it down. I don't know if it is because I have overworked or underworked the idea or what. Am I trying too hard to get it too perfect? Should I let it develop on its own? If I do that I might end up never writing it! Besides, everything that does happen is fully mapped out. Every incident has a reason, all the reasons add up and the story is just screaming to be immortalised in paper. But it seems to want to be immortalised on its own terms. Curious.
This, I have found, is one of the nicer problems we writers have to face. I don't know about you but when people find out you are a writer, they seem to expect to see you physically writing every minute of the day. "Thought you were a writer," they will say. "Don't see you writing!" The truth is, as every writer will know, you never stop writing. Your brain is constantly trying to make sense of your characters, what happens to them, the good and the bad. I feel really bad if I kill off anyone. Seriously! I find it hard to write in a character if I know he or she (or it) is going to meet its doom. It may be absolutely necessary for the story, but the guilt kicks in and I think that maybe I shouldn't kill them off. Maybe there is another way.
When Stephen King wrote Pet Sematary, he intimated it almost killed him when little Gage Creed ran into the road and straight under the wheels of a mega-truck. J K Rowling wept buckets - effectively went into mourning - when Sirius Black was killed in the vaults at the Ministry of Magic. Clearly our characters are alive in our heads and as real to us as our parents, friends, kids. Clearly even they have an instinct of survival. However did Agatha Christie cope with all her murder victims? Did they go on to haunt her from beyond the page?
Getting back to my supernatural story. I recently went with Steve to see Susan Hill's The Woman in Black at the Fortune Theatre in London. It is a brilliant play and I can't recommend it highly enough. It is so simply done, so beautifully portrayed, with just two male actors slipping very cleverly into all the characters the story needs to move along. In fact I was so impressed that I tweeted Susan the next day to tell her how much we'd enjoyed it. I was chuffed when she tweeted back to thank me for being moved enough to write her. In the programme on sale at the venue, there are a couple of articles about how Susan tackled the story of The Woman in Black. She wanted to write a gothic ghost story in the same style as stories such as The Turn of the Screw and A Christmas Carol. How she did it intrigued me enough to go into Waterstones today and actually buy The Woman in Black. My plan now is to devour it completely. Where she was inspired by the writings of Henry James and Charles Dickens, I am hoping to be similarly inspired by her. And maybe then my supernatural story will actually find its voice and let me write it. Does it have a ghost of a chance, do you think?
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