Fiction is and always will be a subjective art form. Some people love one writer and no others ... some people like anything they read. Some like only cyber-punk spaghetti-western vampire detective stories, and some like anything with a beginning, middle and end.
If you want to write: write.
If you want to hone your skills so people will appreciate your work, so that you may get published, maybe in the hopes of landing that national bestseller that nabs you a few mill., then you need to write A LOT.
Anything: short stories, novellas, novels, freakin epic poems. Use one bad idea after another as a strap to your blade, abrasing down the dull edge of inexperience. You have to learn how to FORM a novel. Sometimes it just all flows out of you like water out a spout and sometimes you have to piece it together like a jigsaw puzzle.
It takes even professional fiction writers a long time (sometimes years) to finish a novel (start with short stories) because they are always tweaking and editing and arcing plot lines and changing character nuances. There is also the matter of typeface, line-spacing, justification, story mapping, section/chapter/part placements, backstory (things that a story alludes to that has happened in the "past" before the current events of the story), foreshadowing, conflict/resolution, comedy, ect., ect., ect.
Just because it's a ghost story that some may say sounds a lot like another story/movie that used a similar plot-device, don't feel like your idea isn't original or worth trying out. If you write this story it may become the best ghost story ever written ... it might also become the WORST ghost story ever.
Beowulf, The Odyssey, Hamlet, Grapes of Wrath, Les Miserables, War and Peace, Great Expectations, The Sound and the Fury, Huckleberry Finn, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Slaughterhouse 5, Animal Farm, 1984, Catcher in the Rye, Atlas Shrugged, The Stand, Interview With The Vampire, Harry Potter ...
What do all these stories have in common? They were all read by A LOT of people. Some are considered to be the best literary works in history. Some were just FUN to read. They all provide a good story and are WELL WRITTEN!!!
Take this piece of advice that I use a lot. This is a quote from Ernest Hemmingway:
"If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water."
Sometimes writting a story is a lot like an impromptu jazz solo: It's not only the notes one chooses to play but also the ones that are choosen to not play.
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