Ghostwriting
What Happens When the People Leave but the Characters Stay
Sometimes I think the worst part about being a writer isn’t the rejection or the self-loathing or the unpaid invoices—it’s the ghosts.
Specifically: the ones I invited in. The ones I turned into characters.
I’ve written about people I loved, people who hurt me, people who passed through my life for two months and still show up in my notebooks like they pay rent there. I’ve made them funnier, smarter, more tragic. I’ve made them say the things I wish they’d said, and then I’ve let them go. Or I thought I did. Until I reread the work and realize I’m still keeping them alive, very much against their will.
Recently, I found out I’m a finalist for a national poetry prize, which is, objectively, a big deal. I should have popped champagne or screamed or celebrated for even one minute. Instead, I opened the folder of poems I submitted and felt like I was reading a stranger’s diary.
It was all about someone I no longer speak to. Someone who, if they walked past me on the street, I might not even wave at. The poems felt foreign. Not bad, just—someone else’s. I didn’t know how to reconcile that the most intimate work I’ve ever written is now about a person I wouldn’t text if I were dying.
When I told a friend—a songwriter, a person whose music has been my background noise and my emergency contact for multiple emotional breakdowns—she texted "This happened to me last year for a songwriting competition (except I didn’t even date the man the song was about)."
We decided it was a rite of passage. A canon event. One of those things all girls with big feelings and sharp pens must endure. The moment where you realize you’re the kind of person who eats your own life for content, and then finds out the leftovers don’t taste the same.
We are cannibals, basically. Soft, sensitive, bleeding-heart cannibals who write our way through grief and then get haunted by the ghosts we built out of plot points and half-truths.
There are characters in my work that I know better than I know my own family. Because I invented them. Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe I just recorded them like a court stenographer, and the fiction was in thinking it wasn’t real. Either way, they live on the page in a way the real person never could. Frozen in amber. Locked in a version of the story where I get the last word.
But life keeps moving. People change. We grow up, or sideways, or out of reach. And there I am, still workshopping the same scene where a character based on someone I used to know loves me, trusts me, tells me everything. Meanwhile, in reality, we haven't spoken in over a year. Or they’ve muted me. Or maybe I’ve muted them. It doesn’t have to be romantic for it to sting. Friendships end like stories too.
And I’m not trying to win anyone back. I’m just trying to make the dialogue tighter.
This is the thing no one tells you about writing from life: the life keeps going.
I think the ache comes from the split—that tiny psychic fracture where real memory meets narrative memory. In the real version, maybe I cried and said too much. In the written version, I leave the party first. I always leave first. Because in the rewrite, I have dignity. And a car waiting.
But then you finish the piece. You move on. And yet the character doesn’t. They sit there. They don’t get older. They don’t block you. They don’t change their mind or go to therapy or become someone new. They just keep saying the same thing they said on page forty-two.
That’s the weird part. That’s what makes it feel like a haunting.
Sometimes I wonder if the people I write about would recognize themselves. Sometimes I hope they do. Sometimes I hope they don’t. Sometimes I think about how, if I ever ran into them again, I’d have to confess:
You live in a Word doc.
You have three different names.
You make everyone who reads you fall a little in love.
…
And you’re gone.
But that’s the job, I guess. That’s the cost of being a person who documents. You can’t always control who makes it into the archive. And you can’t always guarantee that they deserve the preservation. Sometimes the person gets blurry, and the character sharpens. Sometimes the poem is better than the love ever was.
Taylor Swift recently announced that she bought back the rights to her own music. She no longer has to re-record the albums stolen from her—including Reputation, a re-record fans were waiting on with open mouths and sharpened pencils. In her letter to fans, she admitted she hadn't even gotten through a quarter of the album. Said it felt impossible to recapture those feelings, that sound. And maybe it is.
But fans have theories. Of course we do. Some say she couldn’t do it because Reputation is, at its core, a love letter to someone who became one of her worst heartbreaks. It is an artifact of a person who doesn't exist anymore, for someone who isn't in her life. And maybe revisiting it felt like too much.
Fans point to footage of her performing "Call It What You Want" after the breakup, and how that song—once so warm and secret and full of reverence—now sounds like she’s spitting it out just to get it over with. Maybe The Tortured Poets Department is what happened when she tried to reenter Reputation and couldn’t. Maybe that’s what writing does. Sometimes you open the old document and realize the ink is still wet. Or worse: dried and cracking and completely unrecognizable.
I don’t write to get the last word. I write because it’s the only thing that makes me feel like I’m not drowning in the quiet parts of my life. But the longer I do this, the more I realize how much of my work is about people I had to lose just to figure out how to describe them.
The poems are still good, by the way. I’ll submit them. I’ll be proud.
But part of me will always wince, just a little, knowing that the person who inspired them probably hasn’t thought about me in months.
And part of me will keep writing about them anyway.