All About Writing The Blue Ghost (cont.)

Where did your idea come from for having Liz walk through a wall to visit the past?

Ah . . . that’s a rather long story. In quick summary, I may not believe in ghosts, but I’ve always believed in being able to walk through walls. When I was very young—perhaps four or five—I had a dream in which a wagon-load of kids pulled by two huge, dapple-gray horses came to me during the night and took me to a playground in the dark of my wall. There we played the night away. The dream came back several times, and I used to lie in bed, facing into the fearsome darkness of my wall, waiting for the dream to come again. Even today, walls never seem completely solid to me.

Is it harder to write a mystery than another type of story? How is the process different?

In some ways a mystery is easier, because it is more about plot than about character. All I have to know before I begin to write is what is going to happen and why, and then I can write the story fairly quickly. In more deeply character-based stories I often have many discoveries to make along the way before I can fully know who my characters are, and that makes for slower writing and more circling back to rethink what I have already written.

Do you believe in ghosts?

I’ll answer that question the way I once heard the writer Avi answer it. I believe in ghost stories, but I don’t believe in ghosts. I enjoy writing ghost stories, because they always deal with large issues, issues so large that they continue to be important even beyond someone’s death. As to believing in ghosts themselves, I’ve never met one and I’d be astonished if I ever did.