P.J. Murphy's Writer Site

WARNING: this post contains mild spoilers. I won’t talk about the end of the book, but will say things that give away what happens in the first few chapters. So if, like me, you prefer to discover a book for yourself, save this one for later…

I’ve mentioned a few times that it took me about fifteen years to complete Dead Letters. I want to share a bit of the journey with you. Not sure why – maybe as a sort of therapy, or maybe as a testament to it.

The idea for Dead Letters came from two main sources. The first was a desire to write a ghost story with a modern twist. I wanted to write about ghosts in non-traditional settings, like supermarkets and nightclubs. And I wanted to build on the idea of ghosts as being stuck in time, hung-up on a particular memory. So my early draft (uncompleted) was about Timothy delivering letters to ghosts, to release them from the moments in time they’re stuck in. It was set in a modern time period.

The other main idea was about exploring how an author’s writing is made up from experiences they’ve had and people they’ve met. I had written two (unpublished) novels by that point and had several times been asked what was my inspiration. Family and close friends sometimes recognised the real-life event that had wound up, in some form or another, in the story. So, I came up with the idea of building a plot about trying to decipher that.

I had also been exploring writing a fantasy novel. Pursuit into Shadow shows up a few times in Dead Letters. I never got beyond the first few pages, but I quite enjoyed being able to salvage some use of it.

So I got to writing. And I got to the last couple of chapters in about 2011-12 before realising that the ending I had planned for it didn’t work. In the original draft, Richard was dead at the beginning of the book. His friends attended a funeral, not a memorial, so there was much less mystery about what had happened. Worse still, the book’s ending reflected poorly on all the main characters. It was gloomy and ignored several of the golden rules about how to finish a book.

So I rethought it. And I realised that if Richard was missing, that would be far more interesting – but it would mean rewriting a good chunk of the book. When you’ve been working on the same thing for several years, by that point, rewriting is not easy. I started but quickly got bogged down. I considered extracting the ghost story bit and just turning it into a children’s book, but on its own, Richard’s novel doesn’t quite stand up. I had intentionally kept the plot quite simple, because there’s already enough complexity in the parallel, interweaving storylines.

So I took a break. And life happened. I moved to Geneva, got married and we had children. I tried coming back to it several times but when you’re sleep-deprived, going back to a novel as complex as Dead Letters is not first on your priority list. I took up other hobbies to keep an outlet for my creative juices, and I wrote Troubleshot (much simpler in structure) in the meantime.

I’m not sure what exactly made me come back to Dead Letters. I think I probably just wanted to give it another try, and not have all that work, all that time invested, to count for nothing. I was hot off having decided to self-publish Troubleshot, and had received good feedback, so I thought ‘why not?’.

I completed the rewrite of Dead Letters during one week in July 2022, isolating with Covid. It was the second time I’d had it, so it was fairly mild, but it was probably not the best thing for my recovery. But once I had started, I was hooked, and wanted to see it through to the end. So, between, regular naps, I did it.

I hope that that compulsion to finish it hits you, too, when you read it. And that you agree that it was worth all the effort. For me, at least, it was. Now I can move on to something new. And not take fifteen years about it.