: Re: What are conventions of ghost stories? When I realised I needed a ghost story for a class I found out that I don't know what the conventions of this genre are. Conversation with a colleague

@Bryan361

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Mystery. Ghost stories saturate themselve in the unknown. Your lead characters may believe in a factual world, but that belief will be challenged as the story progresses. From the first unexplainable event, their beliefs will be attacked by ever increasing, ever more obvious and undeniable, events which serve to beat down their confidence in their own understanding of how the world works.

The lucky ones will leave your story shattered; still alive be struggling to recapture their faith in a harmless reality. Nightmares and doubt will plague them for the rest of their days.

Ghost stories must involve the afterlife (or at least appear to involve the afterlife). They usually have something unsettling to say about what is waiting for us on the other side of the grave. Happy endings are very rare in ghost stories.

But they are fertile ground for character growth and transformation. Seeing a person when they are scared is more revealing than almost any other emotion. So as you write your characters through their terror, take liberties to illuminate every dark secret and anxiety out of their past. Use their histories to justify who lives and who dies, and try to leave your reader with a shiver in their spine and no hope for restful slumber.

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