Control: The Hauntings of Old Liberty High…
I, Dalton Lewis, crafted a different kind of ghost story — something about people unhappy with the community and a community unhappy with them. I wanted dramatic conflict and wonderful characters and started with that — with a tragedy that would ruin lives and make people scream at each other, the sort of bad news that stays with you for a decade or two. I wanted someone to die, and I wanted to write about some people I knew from real life who had died. This was my chance.
Kevin Roosevelt hates himself. This simple start to a novella causes so many problems for so many characters. Sander is kicked off the football team for bullying him. He turns to making friends with the other geeks to atone for his sins. Marie, angry and sad, decides she needs to save lives and runs around fighting crime. Redman has a mental health breakdown (or does he see a ghost) and is sent to a mental ward of the local hospital. Mitch tries to impress the higher-ups of the society only to have his whole life crash around him.
The first chapter is just texts from character to character: no dialogue, no description, no action, just texts. I think that is a great way to develop personalities without description or action. The first scene is Kevin trying to communicate with a pretty girl, Marie, and they are both wonderful people — and it goes horribly through no fault of either of them. They are just different people with different perspectives of a terrible and difficult world.
There are characters who end up in mental wards of the hospital. I was in a mental ward of a hospital and like to write about mental health issues. They are devastated to be in such a place. This is something that I wanted to develop in this story.
I tried to have sympathetic reasons for every character’s behavior in the story and no one be perfect or perfectly bad. I thought that would help create a better, more three-dimensional story. I had a teenage doctor in this story and I totally rewrote his character to be more subtle until the end. I didn’t want to just overwrite him or anything.
It’s fun to write scary ghost scenes in which characters are menaced by horrible apparitions. It’s fun to come up with horrible nonsense for the ghosts to do to the characters. I think that’s the key to the story: the horrible things that happen that develop the characters and turn them into strong, fleshed-out people.
I could have shown the football scenes and the dances and the relationships between the pretty people — I could have had graphic love scenes with Andrea and Marie — but I decided those scenes and plots have been done a thousand times in a thousand permutations. I decided to focus on the outsider emotions and the things that make us different than everyone else. I thought that would make for a good book, and I want you to check it out.
Thanks, and take care, friends.
