When Writing Feels Like Haunting

There are times when writing feels more like being followed than leading. When the characters linger after the last line. When their voices settle into the quiet spaces of your real life and refuse to leave.

I’ve always believed stories have their own gravity. You step into them, thinking you’re in control, but the further you go, the more you realize the story is shaping you, not the other way around.

It happened with Static Between the Trees. The characters, their grief, their fear, their quiet unraveling, found ways to echo long after I’d closed the file. I’d hear a song, and it belonged to them. I’d pass a stretch of fog on a backroad, and suddenly I was back in those fictional woods. Sometimes, it was subtle. Other times, unsettling.

People like to joke that writers disappear into their own worlds. But what they don’t say is sometimes the world follows you back.

There’s a kind of haunting in that. Not the loud, spectral kind. Something softer. More persistent. A quiet presence in the room when you thought you were alone.

It’s not always the story itself that lingers. Sometimes, it’s the emotions. The unfinished grief of a character. The weight of what you had to imagine to make the page feel true.

When I was working on “They Who Steal Time,” one of the stories in Static, I spent weeks thinking about the fear of being forgotten. Of vanishing without a trace. It wasn’t just the characters feeling that, it seeped into my own anxieties, my own late-night thoughts.

Writing is supposed to be cathartic, and it is. But it also opens doors you can’t always close right away.

And maybe that’s not a bad thing.

I think good fiction haunts both ways. It unsettles the reader, but it should unsettle the writer too. It leaves something unfinished in both of us. A question. A quiet ache. The feeling that the story isn’t quite done with you yet.

It makes real life feel a little more fragile. A little more strange.

I’ve had moments, walking through my own neighborhood, where a flicker of shadow or a half-heard sound feels like it belongs to the story, not reality. I’ve caught myself slipping into that headspace... the quiet dread, the uncertainty. But I’ve learned to welcome it.

Because haunting means connection. It means the story mattered enough to stay.

So when people ask if my characters feel real to me, the honest answer is yes. Sometimes more real than I’m comfortable admitting. And when the writing is good, when it cuts deep, they don’t always stay tucked safely on the page.

They follow.

And if I’m lucky, they haunt the reader too.