How to Write Ghost Stories

I just finished reading a collection of short stories by M.R. James (Casting The Runes) that featured a lovely appendix chock-a-block with sage and practical advice from the master of the antiquarian ghost story. It's not often you find a how-to manual of this caliber, so I thought I'd share it with you, dear readers. The funny thing is, after reading the whole book straight through, I wanted to do nothing so much as write an M.R. James parody (working title: The Oxford Don's Seaside Holiday in Which He Finds a Very Strange Book and Is Followed Home) but of course ghost stories aren't meant to make us laugh, as he would sternly inform us. And so, in that vein, James' advice for writing the most terrifying and brilliant stories ever. But first, some dots ....

Let's have some more .....

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"Contemporary, even ordinary...."

First off, the author thinks, "as a rule, the setting should be fairly familiar and the majority of the characters and their talk such as you may meet and hear any day." This is something I noticed long before the appendix: James loves to sneak the terror up on you so he deliberately avoids trying to build a dreadful atmosphere. The drier the atmosphere, the more impact the eventual introduction of the ghost will have. He'll start off with a very plain, simple, quotidian chain of events and ever so lightly add in that one strange dusty object that, of course, turns out to -- whoops! -- open a portal to hell. Or, as he puts it, your protagonists must be "undisturbed by forebodings, pleased by their surroundings."

No nice ghosts....

Another requisite "is that the ghost should be malevolent or odious: amiable ghosts and helpful apparitions are all very well... but I have no use for them." True enough. James will never introduce the ghost of a friendly uncle to help you find a bit of hidden treasure. No, he'll make you wish you had never blown that whistle, written that letter, disturbed that skull or opened that book. His ghosts aren't fucking around. They do want

to kill you. And often succeed.

"Some degree of actuality is the charm of the best ghost stories...."

Though, as mentioned, James likes a contemporary setting, you are allowed to hazard a few ghosts out of the past, although preferably obscured by "a slight haze of distance," for instance, thirty years ago, or "some time before the war." If you can somehow create the effect that you are handing down a "true narrative of remarkable circumstances" that happened to, say your cousin, then you have all the more authority, and everything you say is decidedly scarier.

If you do prefer your ghosts ancient, at least have some sort of rational or contemporary interlocutor to bring it into the present. Medieval knights being chased by ghosts are a nice bit of folk tale, but not really frightening. The ghosts of medieval knights chasing a hapless antiquarian, though, seem all right (because the antiquarian's "finding of documents about it can be made plausible").

Not too gory, please....

James likes to frighten you to death. He does not like to dismember your corpse. If any blood is shed in his stories -- which can indeed involve violent death; how do you think the demons get you? -- it must be "shed with deliberation and carefully husbanded." Got it?

The Climax....

A must: the nicely managed crescendo. James likes the slow burn but once he's got the ghost going, he knows he's got to bring it home and quick while you're still feeling shivery. Drag it out too long and your reader gets bored. A bored person is seldom shivery.

And finally --

Use big words to embiggen your story.....

Here are just a few words I found whilst reading Casting the Runes: peroration, recrudescence, veridical and recondite. I have no idea what any of them mean, which is why M.R. James is a famous writer and I am not. I am going to learn these big words and sprinkle them in all my stories until everyone who reads them thinks I'm so smart I must know what I'm talking about.

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Now you should be equipped to "inspire a pleasing terror" in your reader. But first, perhaps, a few selections from James' reading list. Where he has indicated specific titles, I have faithfully reproduced them here. If only a name is supplied, it means James recommends them pretty much across the board.

- J.S. LeFanu (apparently everything he wrote was "absolutely of the first rank")

- Mrs. Oliphant, "The Open Door"

- Marion Crawford's "Uncanny Tales"

- W. de Morgan, "Alice For Short"

- E.F. Benson

- Ambrose Bierce

- A.M. Burrage, "Some Ghost Stories"

Go forth and read, and write.