What We Often Miss About Ghost Stories

A construction worker died during the refurbishment of the building where I work. He plummeted down an elevator shaft and was killed on impact.

When we moved into the building, people noticed strange sounds and flickering lights when working late. Of course, we assumed it was the construction worker’s ghost.

That was fourteen years ago, and whenever the lights flicker, we think of that young man’s lost soul.

I stopped sending these emails and posting to this blog about nine months ago. I thought it would just be temporary, and I had a great excuse. At most, I thought my absence would be a month.

Then the month became two months, then other stuff came up, and suddenly six months had gone by and the holidays were approaching.

Basically, I’ve ghosted y’all for the better part of this year.

I hope, though, that whenever you thought about creativity, you thought about this Renewable Creativity email/blog. Was my spirit still with you?

The main reason I stopped emailing and blogging is because I prepared a four-part workshop on creativity, and made a workbook to accompany it. It demanded more and more time, and the only way to get it all done was to take from the emailing/blogging time.

So at least something tangible came out of the absence.

Over the past two years, I’ve taken more classes and workshops on writing and creativity than any year in the past decade (2014-2016 was the last busy cycle). I’ve learned and I’ve refined and I’ve put into practice dozens of improvements.

As I go forward in my projects, I recall things I’ve learned or suggestions, and recommendations made by the instructor, their voice or words ringing forth from the haze of my subconscious. Those lessons are basically ghosts in my mind that go bump in the night while I’m trying to figure out how to create something or tell a story.

These are friendly ghosts that only want to help us, and it’s the best kind of haunting.

I took pretty good notes in all my classes, especially those from 2014-2016, which got me a stern rebuke from the instructor when I shared them with classmates because he felt I was stealing his work (write your own damn workbook, I wanted to say, but didn’t).

If you take classes, I hope you kept the notes, worksheets, and any other materials somewhere you can reach them. Sometimes the ghost of lessons past is a bit vague on detail, and I have to go dig through my stuff to be clear on what that lesson was.

I hope this email/blog haunts your future self at some point, and that you welcome the intrusion because it helps you move forward on a creative project.