Seeing Life Through the Eyes of the Dead: A Short Handbook for Writing Ghosts

Despite writing a novel about ghosts, I do not profess to be a ghost expert. But I do know that every April, my family gathers at multiple cemeteries across New York and New Jersey to pay their respects to our grandparents, parents, uncles, and aunties that have passed. We burn gold-flecked paper and “hell notes” (afterlife currency) to line the pockets of our dearly departed. We talk to the gravestones while pouring tea and rice wine along the grass, and our ancestors drink from the earth.

To call these ancestral spirits “ghosts” is weirdly diminishing, but it is the Western catch-all definition for all non-corporeal matter who visit us in the living plane. Which is to say that whatever understanding of ghostly life or unlife we know will always be an inexact translation. Which is to also say that somewhere within that imprecision, the afterlife is closer to us than we think.

Naturally, such rituals with ghosts would come to shape the rules of haunting within How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster. In shaping the world of the novel, in which ghosts are not merely decorative side characters but crucial figures in a not-so-distant future, in a city plagued by weekly acid rainstorms, I ask myself: What if the ghosts we encounter in stories are neither objects of terror nor spirits requiring exorcism? What if a perpetual life with ghosts can radically alter the life of the living?

To write a convincing ghost, especially one whose place in a fantastical world of endless disaster can fade into the background, I have found the following guidelines to be useful for representing their unlife on the page.

Rule #1: Ghosts Never Stay Still

While ghosts may appear bound to the house, the cursed cemetery, or site of unresolved interest, a ghost by nature is porous; they slip through the cracks between planes. In Koji Suzuki’s Ring (1991) (later adapted into the highly popular Ring and The Ring Japanese and American horror films), the ghost image of Sadako Yamamura appears on a VHS tape that when watched leaves the viewer with only one week before the ghost takes their life. The only way to escape death is to have another unwitting viewer watch it, thus ensuring the continuation of the unlife of Sadako. Seemingly confined to a piece of analog technology, the ghost transcends the tape.

The ghosts of my novel, How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable possess a similar restlessness. Having arrived mysteriously en masse at a public housing project on the Lower East Side, the ghosts find themselves bound at first to their living family members in the building, who in turn are bound to their apartments, unable to leave because of the rain, the precarious protection of subsidized housing in an increasingly expensive city, or both.

Shin, an awkward talking ghost roach, is the only non-blood related kin sharing an apartment with the living Ma, her daughter Mira, and the poltergeist patriarch known as Grandpa Why. Without memory of his former life, or any knowledge of why or how he has found himself in a stranger’s home, Shin’s ghosthood is one panic attack after another. He finds himself slipping through the floorboards, passing through walls, unable to find any fixity in his step.

Rule #2: Let Ghosts Desire

It’s a common story structural element to give each human character a desire and a corresponding obstacle. It is perhaps less common to give ghosts their equal due. Yet given their opportunity to yearn, fail, and try again, every human and ghost must reckon with the ways in which their desires exacerbate existing tensions across not only the world of the living but the many levels of a spiritual plane.

Such is the case with Toni Morrison’s Beloved, set in post-slavery era Cincinnati, Ohio and where the brutality of enslavement haunts the protagonist Sethe’s memories and present life. It is the ghost of her daughter, named Beloved because of the inscription of her tombstone, who returns to haunt her home—her death, a consequence of Sethe’s desire to prevent her daughter from growing up as an enslaved child.

Desire need not always be good, and in this case, it is a response to the horrors and traumas that circumscribes Beloved’s early death. Her desire to reclaim her mother comes at a price for the living people around her, and it takes a village to exorcize this ghost and create a path towards collective healing for the haunted family.

The ghosts in my novel are roaring with desire, especially when the afterlife coincides with the world of the living. For the protagonist Mira the question of inter-realm dating becomes highly probable when her ex-girlfriend Mal passes away. Despite the confinement imposed by acid rainstorms, the presence of ghostly desire expands the world of the living and the dead, propelling human and ghost to attempt to traverse each plane to reach one another.

Rule #3: Let Ghosts Become Heroes in the Afterlife

Not every ghost comes with malice or vengeance. In Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, there are both ill-intended spirits puppeted by greed-fueled men like protagonist Ti-Jeanne’s abusive grandfather, and ancestral spirits that come to aid against him. Drawing form Afro-Caribbean folklore, the novel’s Obeah, or seer women, become a powerful bridge between the corrupted city life ruled by power-hungry men and the great beyond. The intervention of ancestral spirits, conjured by Ti-Jeanne’s grandmother Gros-Jeanne, not only rescues the woman from a deadly fate, but breaks a powerful intergenerational trauma bond so that the women as well as the city can know some peace.

If my familial connection with ghosts is any influence, I know ghosts that are hungry—charged with violence from their living days, cursed to walk the shadows of their afterlife, unable to pass into reincarnation—and I know ghosts that watch over us. According to several mediums, I am watched over by many women ancestors of both familial lines. One envisions my grandmother placing a crown upon my head. More than simply benevolent spirits, I feel the charge of their loving and protective presence, and it is this force that propels me to believe that ghosts can be the heroes of our stories too.

My character Grandpa Why appears first as a prankster ghost, deeply unserious. Much like the elders in our lives, his presence is overlooked, dismissed, and seen as disruptive to the central drama of everyone’s days. Yet, in writing his story, it occurred to me that if anyone deserves to be a hero, it is the ghost of a man who has survived decades of immigration, familial violence, poverty, and the loss of the love of his life. The span of his endurance is unknown to those around him, and in his furtive resiliency, he possesses a wisdom that ultimately profoundly shifts the lives of those around him.

I believe that ghosts are not merely here to haunt, but to shift the ways in which we see the parameters of a life—in our corporeal form, we are limited by flesh, bone, and bone. By contrast, ghosts have the foresight of eternity. Not merely a source of lament but a beginning for some of the characters within the novel. I would like to think that writing better ghosts is not so much about how we can excise them, tame them, or bend them to the will of the living. I believe that upon closer inspection, ghosts can teach us something about how to live.

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How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster by Muriel Leung is available from W.W. Norton & Company.