![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hobgoblinnNot the right time of year for this, but I was thinking about it, and how we humans make stories. So--
I was driving with my son the other night, and he was talking about a video he’d seen recently-- “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” And he noted that there was less talk about science in this story, and more about supernatural stuff. And talk turned to how ghost stories start in the first place. I told him that usually, ghost stories start with some real event, that gets embellished over time. And he said, “How could that happen?” So I gave him a real life example. And then-- he gave me his own. And it was amazing.
My example was this: when I was in college, I worked for the campus police. And one of our officers was a tall thin man, with striking white hair. He was a good friend, and a good officer. And not very old, only 48, when he died very suddenly, of a heart attack.
I was a night dispatcher, and I would often get off work either very late, or very early in the morning. One night, not long after Bill had died, I was walking back across campus to my dorm. There was a long, wide sidewalk running the length of the central part of the campus, and I was at one end of it. And I looked -- and at the other end of the walk, I saw a very tall person wearing a dark bomber style jacket passing underneath one of the lamps. The person had white hair, and the gait looked very familiar to me. As did the jacket, very similar in style to that worn by our officers.
Was it Bill’s ghost? I’d like to think so. I deliberately didn’t get close enough to tell for sure one way or the other. It gave me a lot of comfort, and still does, to think that he was still watching over us. I could easily make this experience into a ghost story-- in fact, the above is more detailed and skewed in that direction than the bare bones outline I told my son. He looked thoughtful when I finished, and then he told me this story.
For several years, my son was in the care of the state, and he needed more care than a foster family could provide. So he was at a local children’s home. And there was a particular groundskeeper who was kind to him, and he would often see this man mowing the grass or caring for the many growing things on the grounds. He once told my son that he had grown up here himself, and that he had planted many of the flowering plants himself, as a boy.
After this man died, my son says he saw him one day near one of these plants, which he had been noticing wasn’t doing very well now that its caretaker was gone. He says he saw the man look up from across the grounds and nod at him. When he got over there, the figure was nowhere to be seen. But my son did notice that the flower seemed to be doing much better.
We make stories for lots of reasons. To comfort us. To share our beliefs about how the world is. To make sense of an often nonsensical existence. We wouldn’t write or tell our tales, if we didn’t need to do it on some basic level. And we wouldn’t read others’ tales, unless it filled something inside us.
So I put it to you, writers and readers-- what do you need? And when was the last time you thought about how those needs, and the needs of the audience, fit into your stories?
I was driving with my son the other night, and he was talking about a video he’d seen recently-- “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” And he noted that there was less talk about science in this story, and more about supernatural stuff. And talk turned to how ghost stories start in the first place. I told him that usually, ghost stories start with some real event, that gets embellished over time. And he said, “How could that happen?” So I gave him a real life example. And then-- he gave me his own. And it was amazing.
My example was this: when I was in college, I worked for the campus police. And one of our officers was a tall thin man, with striking white hair. He was a good friend, and a good officer. And not very old, only 48, when he died very suddenly, of a heart attack.
I was a night dispatcher, and I would often get off work either very late, or very early in the morning. One night, not long after Bill had died, I was walking back across campus to my dorm. There was a long, wide sidewalk running the length of the central part of the campus, and I was at one end of it. And I looked -- and at the other end of the walk, I saw a very tall person wearing a dark bomber style jacket passing underneath one of the lamps. The person had white hair, and the gait looked very familiar to me. As did the jacket, very similar in style to that worn by our officers.
Was it Bill’s ghost? I’d like to think so. I deliberately didn’t get close enough to tell for sure one way or the other. It gave me a lot of comfort, and still does, to think that he was still watching over us. I could easily make this experience into a ghost story-- in fact, the above is more detailed and skewed in that direction than the bare bones outline I told my son. He looked thoughtful when I finished, and then he told me this story.
For several years, my son was in the care of the state, and he needed more care than a foster family could provide. So he was at a local children’s home. And there was a particular groundskeeper who was kind to him, and he would often see this man mowing the grass or caring for the many growing things on the grounds. He once told my son that he had grown up here himself, and that he had planted many of the flowering plants himself, as a boy.
After this man died, my son says he saw him one day near one of these plants, which he had been noticing wasn’t doing very well now that its caretaker was gone. He says he saw the man look up from across the grounds and nod at him. When he got over there, the figure was nowhere to be seen. But my son did notice that the flower seemed to be doing much better.
We make stories for lots of reasons. To comfort us. To share our beliefs about how the world is. To make sense of an often nonsensical existence. We wouldn’t write or tell our tales, if we didn’t need to do it on some basic level. And we wouldn’t read others’ tales, unless it filled something inside us.
So I put it to you, writers and readers-- what do you need? And when was the last time you thought about how those needs, and the needs of the audience, fit into your stories?
