Home » How I Use My Hauntings as My Creative Guide

How I Use My Hauntings as My Creative Guide

April 15, 2025 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

By Taryn Hubbard

Everyone has something unique they obsess over, that keeps them up at night, or ticks away in the back of their mind. I refer to mine as my hauntings. When I set out to write my debut novel, The Very Good Best Friend, I had been ruminating about many of the themes examined in the book for years so they felt like they were a part of me. Exploring these hauntings on the page was what kept me going back to the manuscript to see it through to completion time and time again. It wasn’t easy going through the story draft by draft as a first-time novelist, but that’s the essence of a haunting—it follows you wherever you go whether you like it or not.

Through this experience of writing my debut novel, I have come to think about my hauntings as a creative guide, as something that fuels me rather than restricts me. It helped that Carolyn, my main character in The Very Good Best Friend, was also experiencing both emotional and physical hauntings throughout the story.

She was haunted by the memories of her twin sister who disappeared one afternoon on a family camping trip over two decades earlier. As Carolyn sets out to rescue her best friend from a sinister intentional community led by a billionaire promising student loan forgiveness set out of an abandoned mall, those memories of her sister start to physically manifest within the mall’s crumbling walls. For me, while I hadn’t experienced losing a sister, Carolyn’s eerie experience of the empty mall was informed by my interpretation of them. A dusty food court. Shattered glass. Forgotten spider plants gone wild. Yellowing posters peeling off the walls of an old bookstore. Ghosts!

My hauntings started when I started to notice more and more vacant and empty malls in the communities I visited. Boarded-up doors, papered windows with handwritten signs saying For Lease, and empty parking lots that seemed to go on for days. Brick and mortar shops have seen steady declines for decades, especially as large malls succeeded in attracting shoppers away from main streets. But nothing lasts forever.

The so-called retail apocalypse has long extended into malls as well, especially after the pandemic. The empty malls, also known as dead malls, felt unnerving to me. They also felt like wasted space. What else could go in an empty mall, I’d wonder as my haunting became stronger. What if someone who needed a home lived there instead? What if a whole community lived there? But what if the intentions of the community were not as altruistic as the leader claimed?

To use a haunting as a creative guide means examining what it is about the haunting that hooks you in, much like a story hook. For me, it was the abandoned mall as both an unsettling space and a space that could have another potential use. My understanding of this space provided an open slate to let my imagination get to work, and, because I was fascinated by them, it helped me see my story through from beginning to end.

The Very Good Best Friend is my debut novel, but it’s not the first novel-length manuscript I’ve written. I’ve had many false starts with stories that petered out after reaching the midway point, and I’ve decided to stop drafting completed manuscripts simply because I wasn’t feeling it. Luckily, those words were not wasted because it was all good practice for what was to come.

And what was to come was a story, a character, and a setting that I couldn’t keep in the drawer like the others.

The characters in my debut novel felt more real than in my other stories because they felt more urgent. When I was drafting this manuscript and I came across an article about another store closing, I thought about my story and my characters and how I needed to tell the best story about what they were going through as I could. My hauntings kept me working at my story during parts of the drafting process that were tough, such as developing a fulsome story arc for my main character that I was proud of, and parts of the drafting that were fun, such as executing the perfect twist.

While well-intended writing advice exults the adage of “write what you know,” especially for writers who are just starting to write book-length projects, there is something to be said about exploring themes that feel mysterious to you and keep you up at night instead. Maybe it’s simply because they are more interesting. After all, a writer spends more time than anyone else with their manuscript, so it’s important that they find their character’s journey and setting inspiring, and in my case while I was writing The Very Good Best Friend, a little bit spooky.

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Taryn Hubbard is the author of The Very Good Best Friend, her debut novel set to release with Now or Never Publishing in April 2025. Her first poetry collection, Desire Path, was published by Talonbooks in 2020, and she will publish a second collection in 2026. She lives in Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada.

Website: https://tarynhubbard.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tarynhubs/

THE VERY GOOD BEST FRIEND

Embarking on a quest to locate her best friend Rebecca, who abruptly left everything behind to join an enigmatic intentional community overseen by a wealthy magnate within the depths of an abandoned mall nestled in the countryside, Carolyn joins forces with a determined local journalist determined to unveil the truth behind the community’s enigmatic leader, a man who presents himself as a benevolent figure liberating those burdened by student loan debt and the shackles of capitalism. However, as Carolyn draws closer to the mall, she finds herself increasingly ensnared in the community’s eerie and bewildering atmosphere, with Rebecca slipping further from her grasp. Amidst the unsettling backdrop, Carolyn wrestles not only with the specters of her past–her twin sister’s baffling disappearance decades before–but with the unsettling notion that her sibling’s spirit may be manifesting within the confines of the mall, its sinister influence looming ever larger.