A friend and I decided this morning that I should write a ghost story for the holiday season, a sort of Christmas Carol where Scrooge turns out to be right.

We were going on and on about how much we just love converting our living rooms into forests every year, with all the attendant falling branches and moldy puddles and mountains of composting needles being ground into carpets and other things we don’t normally leave lying around outside. And how fun it is to try to thread electric cords with little light bulbs through all of that, especially when you spend half an hour at it getting poked and prodded by the needles and branches and risking breaking the fragile little bulbs into a thousand cutting shards in your carpet, and then you’re done and it turns out none of the bulbs work. And hanging breakables from the aforementioned falling branches. And either climbing on teetering chairs to get a star on top of the tree and falling into it or putting a child up on your shoulders so they can fall into it. And your kids getting wound up on sugar from all the extra cookies and candy-canes, so even if they don’t fall into the tree you can enjoy the piercing, hysterical shrieks as they imagine they’re just about to. And the pointless fights among adults engendered by the raw nerves from listening to all the piercing shrieks.

Now, because I’ve been writing a lot lately about plot and how to construct one—hook, conflicts, faux resolution, climax—I thought right away, What will be my hook? My conflicts? My climax? And I had some ideas, which I had not yet written down, when I got deeply embroiled in sorting out the logic behind the story. Because ghost stories, being fantasy, need rules made up for them, and this involves a lot of logic.

It’s bad enough when you write a realistic story and let illogical things happen—as we all know, real life does not have to make sense, but fiction always does. But you simply can’t get away with writing a fantasy story and letting illogical things happen. This is dues ex machina in the worst way, and as soon as the reader stops believing in your logic they stop caring about your story.

The real beauty of all stories—but especially fantasy and sci fi—is the logic behind them. Not only do you put your characters through hell, but you make sure the reader can’t possibly see any way to avoid it. . .

Read the full essay on Pulp Rag.

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