A Certain Slant of Light

From an interview with Laura Whitcomb.

Tay: How did you come up with the plot for A Certain Slant of Light?

Laura: I was cleaning my apartment one day while listening to an Anne Rice Book-on-Tape. I liked the way her narrator was speaking in an antiquated way but commenting on contemporary life. I thought it would be fun to do that, but you don’t have to use a vampire – a ghost can also hang around for years, even centuries, past her decade of origin. I thought, what would be the strangest thing that could happen to a ghost who has been hovering about unseen for 130 years? Having someone look her in the eyes? So I had my ghost clinging to a High School English teacher when one of his eleventh grade students sees her. The next question was, why could he see her when no one else has been able to? Could it be because he is also a ghost? Maybe he found a way to borrow a body. So, I asked myself, what would they think of each other? When I decided that they would fall in love, the next problem was that he had a physical form and she did not. How would they get her a body? Unfortunately, the families they borrowed into were incompatible. And soon they realized that they would need to give back the bodies of the two teenagers. Only they didn’t know how. Ultimately the ghosts needed to figure out why they were haunting the earth rather than having been invited into heaven. So the short answer to the question is that I came up with the plot by asking myself a series of questions and then answering them with imagination.