Ghosts' Rules NOT Ghosts Rule

You Can’t Just Let the Ghosts Do Whatever They Want

One of the funny things about writing a novel is how much time you can spend developing things that barely make it onto the page.

While I was writing The Ninth Herb, I somehow ended up creating a fairly elaborate set of rules for ghosts. I worked out how different kinds of hauntings behaved, what ghosts could and couldn’t do, how they communicated, and how you could tell the difference between an actual conscious spirit and something more like an echo.

Then I gave Leopold years of experience studying all of it even though very little of that actually appears in the finished book.

I still needed to know it.

Ghosts can cause problems for a writer because once you decide they exist, you have to decide what they can do. Can everyone see them? Can they touch things? Can they move around freely? Can they learn new things after they die? Can they answer questions? Can they lie?

And if you’re writing any kind of mystery, there’s the particularly annoying question of why the ghost doesn’t simply explain what happened and save everyone a great deal of trouble.

So Leopold became my way of figuring out the rules.

He had spent years observing hauntings and keeping records. He tried to separate coincidence from actual communication and paid attention to patterns. A sound repeating in the same place every night might be something residual, almost like a recording left behind. A spirit that reacted to a person, answered questions, or showed preferences was something else entirely.

He was cautious about assuming every unexplained thing was a message from the dead, which I liked about him. If a candle flickered, Leopold wasn’t immediately announcing that Aunt Louise had crossed the veil.

Then Grégoire came along.

Grégoire responded to people. He understood what was happening around him. He had preferences and opinions. Leopold’s notes gradually became less like records of a phenomenon and more like observations about someone he knew.

That relationship shaped a huge amount of Leopold’s backstory. I worked out materials that affected manifestations, including cedar, and how he tested his theories over the years. I thought about the different kinds of hauntings he had encountered and which ones had made him reconsider what he thought he knew.

Most of this stayed in my notes.

At first, that can feel a little ridiculous. You spend hours working out the rules of an imaginary universe and then use a few sentences of it, but I think that hidden work matters.

Because I knew Leopold’s history, I knew how he would react when something supernatural happened. I knew what would surprise him and what he would dismiss. I knew when something crossed the line from unusual to genuinely alarming.

I didn’t have to explain all of that to the reader every time. Leopold could simply behave like someone who had been studying ghosts for years.

That is one of the parts of worldbuilding I enjoy most. The reader doesn’t need every map, family history, rule, timeline, or strange little bit of research that exists behind the story. Those things can still shape what ends up on the page.

Sometimes you need to know why two characters stopped speaking ten years ago even if the argument is never described. Sometimes you need to know what is behind a locked door even if nobody opens it. Sometimes you apparently need an entire ghost classification system so one man can react correctly when a dead person knocks something off a shelf.

I probably know far more about Leopold’s ghosts than anyone reading The Ninth Herb ever will.

That’s fine.

The ghosts know the rules, Leopold knows the rules, and I know the rules.

The reader just gets to watch what happens when somebody breaks them.