{"id":2208,"date":"2016-06-20T13:57:08","date_gmt":"2016-06-20T13:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=2208"},"modified":"2020-01-18T09:36:43","modified_gmt":"2020-01-18T14:36:43","slug":"why-writers-believe-in-ghosts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/why-writers-believe-in-ghosts\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Writers Believe in Ghosts"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s because all of us writers are haunted.<\/p>\n

Not by reviews that sting or that never even happened. Not by interviews that went sideways. Not by book tours that flopped or by books whose sales figures were disappointing.<\/p>\n

No, many of the specters clustered around our desks, laptops, and tablets are the books we started and gave up on. They’re in our dreams, and their presence lingers no matter what we complete and publish.<\/p>\n

We have unfinished chapters, abandoned proposals, piles of research we’ve boxed, notes we scribbled and filed and can barely decipher any more.\u00a0 Even shelves’ worth of reference books we’re gathered together, read or skimmed or never got to.\u00a0 There are also characters we fell in love with but we couldn’t get around to giving them life.<\/p>\n

And then there the ghosts that are somewhat more insidious.\u00a0 These are the ghosts inside<\/em> the books we’ve written: the plot twists we changed and regretted after the book came out, the scenes we axed for one reason or another, the narrative threads we cut for expediency or coherence but later wished we hadn’t.\u00a0 And sometimes a book is haunted by what you wanted it to be, and what you couldn’t accomplish for any number of reasons: a deadline, mischance, falling ill, or just not being ready.<\/p>\n

I’ve got a full file drawer for just one novel alone that never grew past a first chapter I’m crazy about.\u00a0 Every time I’ve gone back to it, I’ve thought the research involved would take too long, plus I’ve doubted the book’s marketability.\u00a0 It’s a novel about a murdered American artist and I’ve got all sorts of juicy material about him and his family, including a rare book of poetry published by the killer.<\/p>\n

For all the time I spent living and dreaming that book, it’s stuck in the land of What Might Have Been.\u00a0 The further away from it I get, the less inviting the whole project becomes.<\/p>\n

I’m not alone: I know we’re all ghost writers of one kind or another.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Lev Raphael is the author of The Vampyre of Gotham<\/a> and 24 other books which you can find on Amazon<\/a>.\u00a0 You can follow him on Twitter at <\/strong>www.twitter.com\/LevRaphael<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s because all of us writers are haunted. Not by reviews that sting or that never even happened. Not by interviews that went sideways. Not by book tours that flopped or by books whose sales figures were disappointing. No, many of the specters clustered around our desks, laptops, and tablets are the books we started … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[215,497,99,95,165,626,496,338,745,214,730,495],"class_list":["post-2208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-a-writers-life","tag-authors","tag-career","tag-creative-writing-2","tag-inspiration","tag-novelists","tag-publishing","tag-research","tag-the-ghost-writer","tag-the-writing-life","tag-unfinished-books","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2208"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5504,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2208\/revisions\/5504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}