The Ghost of Your Hero’s Backstory, Part 2

Here are four strategies for how to use ghosts.

You can show the effects of the past traumatic event on the hero . . . show the event that caused the ghost . . . reveal the ghost slowly . . . or hide the ghost until the last possible moment.

Show the Effects of the Past Traumatic Event

When the story begins, the traumatic event that caused the hero’s ghost is already in the past, and we don’t see it. This is nice in some cases because it makes the life of the hero feel larger than the frame of the story.

So, for example, let’s say a hero’s loved one has died, but we don’t see the tragic event. The story starts after this tragedy has already happened. We meet the hero in the aftermath, when this event exerts its traumatic influence on the hero’s life. And that influence should be evident in nearly every aspect of the hero’s life: in their behaviors, relationships, style of clothing, living situation, work life, and so on.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the play opens when Hamlet’s father is already dead, and a ghost appears to the night watchmen. The restless ghost of his father haunts Hamlet and tortures him with the uncertainty of how to respond to his father’s death, but we never see the death itself.

In the movie Unforgiven (1992), Clint Eastwood’s character, William Munny, has lost his wife. We don’t see her death; we see her grave. We don’t see his previous good life with her; we see only how William Munny struggles alone to be a father.

In Yes Man (2008), we don’t see Jim Carrey’s breakup with his girlfriend. We see only the aftermath; his life is in ruins. 

In Taken (2008), we don’t see the slow dissolution of the marriage of Liam Neeson’s character, Bryan Mills, caused by devotion to his work. We see the aftermath: Bryan Mills, divorced, is no longer the center of his daughter’s life.

In The 4o-year-old Virgin (2005), the hero’s ghost is not a particular event but a particular failure: he is forty years old and has not had sex. He lives a boyish life as a bachelor. A ghost does not have to be heartbreak, death, or violence. A character can be haunted by a personal failing. 

Show the Event that Caused the Ghost

I tend to prefer this strategy in my own work. 

If an event is important, I think it should be shown. I don’t want to rely on flashbacks, which arrest the momentum of the story by pulling us back in time, and I don’t want to worry that the reader doesn’t feel the impact of the ghost on the hero. So I like dramatizing those particular scenes that haunt the hero for the remainder of the novel.

I also remember something Stephen King said. If you find yourself relying on flashbacks, he wrote (I’m paraphrasing), maybe you should back up and start the story earlier. If an event is so important that you keep going back to it, maybe you should dramatize that event in the chronological order of the main storyline—just don’t do it in a prologue, preface, introduction, or foreword (ugh). Call it Chapter One, and keep going.

There are exceptions to this, of course. In Hamlet, the whole point is that Hamlet didn’t see the death of his father. We don’t see it either, and that enables us to share his point of view as he struggles to decide how to respond. In the Bourne novels and movies, the hero suffers from amnesia, and so we share his point of view in flashbacks as he recovers his memories. Jason Bourne’s struggle is to remember who he was and to overcome his fate as he tries to become who he wants to be.

Let’s get back to the strategy of dramatizing the event that caused the ghost.

In Finding Nemo (2003), we see, indirectly (it’s a family movie), the tragedy of the barracuda eating a mother fish and her clutch of eggs. It’s a harrowing massacre. We won’t forget it. There will be no need for flashbacks. A single egg is left, to be raised by the father, Marlin. We then leap in time to see how Marlin is faring as a single dad.

The death of Bruce Wayne’s parents is one of the most famous instances of a ghost. In some versions of the story of Batman, we get the death of his parents in flashback. In others, we see it dramatized in the timeline of the story. In Batman Begins (2005), we get a little of both as Christopher Nolan interweaves three storylines in the first act: the death of Bruce Wayne’s parents, the rise of crime in Gotham, and the birth of Batman.

In John Wick (2014), we see John Wick coping with life as a widower. Flashbacks to his happy life with his wife and to his wife’s sudden illness are interwoven with the present storyline of John attending her funeral and receiving her posthumous gift of a puppy. It’s by way of the transference of his feelings for his wife onto the puppy that we experience the dramatization of the event (the killing of the puppy) as akin to the tragic death of his wife. The ghost that haunts John Wick is not just about the killing of the puppy; it’s about the death of his wife.

Reveal the Ghost Slowly

To reveal the ghost slowly, you can use flashbacks, exposition, and dialogue.

In the Bourne series, the amnesiac hero has flashes of lost memory. The past comes to him in jagged pieces he struggles to understand. He also relies on a journal, on research, on conversations with others, and on action-packed hunts to find clues to his past.

In Unforgiven, there is a kind of second ghost. We learn, in conversations Munny has with his friend and with others, that he was a bad man saved by the love of a good woman, and Munny worries that the bad man in him will return now that his wife is dead. We never saw the bad man he used to be, but slowly, over the course of the movie, we see the bad man in Munny emerge, scene by scene. His past self is the ghost that haunts him, and in the end, his past self returns.

Something similar happens in John Wick. John Wick retired as an assassin for the love of a good woman, and when that woman dies, his old self threatens to return. He tries to resist it, but his nature as an exceptional assassin can’t help but emerge when the bad guys keep making dumb choices to provoke him.

In the Harry Potter series, we get a mix of techniques for revealing the ghost slowly over the course of the entire series. Harry is an orphan, so his parents have died before the story starts. He has a mark on his forehead from the villain who killed his parents. He is haunted by the loss of his parents, the stigma of being an orphan, and the mystery of his survival. 

But we don’t get the full picture until the end of the final installment, and so we learn about the ghost of Harry’s origin and his own nature in every way possible: through symbols, relationships, dialogue, exposition, flashbacks, and plot.

Hide the Ghost Until the Last Possible Moment

For instances of this technique, see Death of a Salesman (1948), Shutter Island (2010), A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014), The Guilty (2021), Kimi (2022), and Fleabag (2016), the first season.

I have not dared to use this strategy. I don’t like the idea of withholding the nature of the ghost until the end of the story because it goes against my instincts to respect the reader. If you do this as a writer, you’re taking the risk of alienating the reader.

The ghost influences a hero’s decisions, and if you, as reader or viewer, are in the dark about the nature of the ghost for most of the story because the author has withheld this information, then, yes, you may experience the mystery of not knowing the hero’s motivations, but . . .

. . . there are serious costs. 

One cost is that you may not identify with the hero because their choices don’t make sense. Another cost is that when the nature of the ghost is finally revealed at the end, you may feel that you’ve been tricked not by the hero but by the writer or filmmaker. 

There’s nothing wrong with a good twist (a betrayal by a false friend, a revelation of the true identity of the villain, and so on), but withholding a plot twist until the end is totally different from withholding the nature of the ghost until the end. 

The ghost helps us identify with the hero by clarifying the hero’s motivations. If you hide the ghost until the end, you may discover that the hero is not at all the person you thought you knew, and you may resent being lied to or manipulated in bad faith by the writer or filmmaker. 

We don’t care about being deceived about the nature of the villain, but we do care about being deceived about the nature of the hero, because we drop our guards, empathize with the hero, and stand in their place. To be deceived by someone we choose to pretend to be can feel like our trust has been broken by a close friend. So this technique (revealing the ghost at the end) can be a very tricky thing. 

Be wary of this technique.

In The Anatomy of Story (2007), John Truby writes of this technique that “it is usually a bad idea, because then the ghost—the power of the past—dominates the story and keeps pulling everything backward.” 

He means (I think) that if you don’t know what the ghost is, you keep wondering what it is, and that means you keep coming up with possibilities to explain your hero’s actions. When the ghost is revealed at the end, it’s like you’re going backwards, revisiting the hero’s actions, and rewriting all your emotions from the start of the story onward to fit this new information.

I felt this way watching the movie Kimi (2022). The hero was clearly suffering the effects of some trauma (I assumed), one that kept her housebound. But I was on the outside and had to keep guessing what was driving her behavior. Eventually, the viewer finds out, but the nature of the ghost arrives awfully late. If it hadn’t been a Steven Soderbergh movie, I would not have stuck with it.

Like so many, I was wildly impressed by the first season of Fleabag because it was such an amazing show . . . until the last episode of that first season, when the creators gave me the finger, more or less. The creators tricked me. They withheld absolutely critical information about the hero’s ghost until the last episode. It was like finding out a lover has been cheating on you the whole time, and the revelation of the affair forces you to redefine the entire relationship. Nothing was what you thought it was. That’s what finding out the truth of the hero’s ghost in this show was like: a total betrayal by the creators of the show.

And in this series, it was especially egregious because the hero talks directly to the camera. She confides in the viewer. She reveals her in-the-moment thoughts. But that turned out to be just another trick. I don’t blame the main character in the story, of course, for not telling me about her ghost. I blame the creators. The hero would’ve told the truth about her ghost. She knew it the whole time. The ghost drove her decisions and her thinking and her behavior. It was her creators who made her withhold that information.

And even worse: every other character in the show knew the nature of her ghost. I, as the viewer, was the only one who didn’t know. So, yeah, no, I did not watch the second season. The bad faith was too blatant. Fool me once . . .

And not to pick on Fleabag as the only story that irked me with how it used the ghost, I can say that, in most other instances, I feel betrayed when the ghost is revealed only at the end. See Shutter Island, The Guilty, and A Walk Among the Tombstones for other examples of stories in which this technique falls flat.

So because I, as a reader or viewer, don’t like the feeling of having the ghost withheld until the end, I, as a writer, don’t use that technique in my fiction and probably never will. 

But that’s me.

Two Final Observations on Using the Ghost

I can recommend the first season (emphasis on first) of Lincoln Lawyer (2022) for a series that uses the concept of the ghost in excellent ways to dramatize the growth of the hero. 

In the first season, the hero has a personal failing (a surfing accident led to an addiction to painkillers) and a professional failing (an innocent client of his went to prison). Over the course of the story (based on novels by Michael Connelly), the hero faces the ghost of his past case, overcomes his addiction by staying clean, and, finally, returns to surf.

In the Harlen Corben series Stay Close (2021), a character hides the secret of her past life to protect her family in her new life. But in the end, just when the truth has set her free, she is burdened with a brand-new horrible secret to keep in order to protect her family. It’s a devilish irony for the hero to escape one ghost only to be haunted by a new one.

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