I was writing a prompt about a haunted library for 6 months and my friend just said 'but why is it haunted?'

2 comments

2 Comments

It's like people forget the whole point of a ghost story is the ghost. I see this with recipes online now, a three page story before you get to the ingredients. Sometimes the backstory is just "it's old and spooky" and that's fine.

robin_foster11mo ago

Actually ghost stories need some setup to work. The backstory makes you care when the ghost shows up. A recipe blog can skip straight to ingredients because you just want to make cookies. But a ghost without context is just a random scary thing, not a story. The problem is when writers drag it out forever, not that they have a backstory at all.