The Ghosts That Shape a Story

By Tyron Devotta

Writing Day of the Sun God became a journey into divided loyalties, hidden fears and the imagined possibilities within Ceylon’s wartime history.

Two Truths, One Character

The Irish author Colum McCann has been quoted as saying that there is always room for at least two truths. For a writer, that is a comforting thought. Characters become far more interesting when they see the same world differently, each holding beliefs that make sense to them. Those differences can create tension, misunderstanding and unexpected turns in a story.

But what is more interesting is if characters have dual personalities. Not necessarily schizophrenia, but sometimes dual beliefs.

A character arc is the inner journey a character takes. The plot concerns what happens to them; the arc concerns how those experiences change their beliefs, fears or behaviour. In her writing on character arcs, K.M. Weiland explores the resistance to change. We may spend years wishing our lives were different, only to discover, when change arrives, that we long for things as they were. Characters are much the same. They resist, and that resistance creates conflict, which in turn helps drive the plot.

History Leaves Room for Imagination

My first novel, Day of the Sun God, unfolds against the backdrop of the Easter Sunday attack on Ceylon in 1942. Its foundations lie in historical fact, but its characters and their story are fictional. Within that framework, the narrative explores a counterfactual possibility: what might have happened in the gaps that history leaves unexplained.

Yet this larger story begins with something quite ordinary: a boy meets a girl situation. Does that make it a romance novel? I would emphatically say no. But there is certainly romance within it.

When Characters Lead the Writer

Lieutenant Colonel Blackthorn’s awkward encounter with a woman at church in Galle Fort one Sunday, followed by her father’s invitation to lunch at their estate bungalow, provided a simple opening through which I could begin to explore a complex character. As the two interacted, I discovered aspects of them that I had not anticipated. Their relationship began to influence the direction of the story.

For me, this is where character and plot become inseparable. I did not know everything that would follow. Much of my writing happens within that uncertainty. My characters keep running around doing things, and I follow like a faithful scribe, recording their actions and gradually discovering their reasons. Their wants, needs and fears shape their choices. Sometimes those motives remain hidden from the reader for a while, creating suspense until an action that seemed puzzling begins to make sense.

A First Draft Is Only the Beginning

Some people find it hard to believe that I have been working on this novel for more than ten years. What surprises them even more is that I wrote the first complete draft, from the opening chapter to the last, in about a year and a half.

Finishing that draft, however, was only the beginning. As my friends and relatives read the manuscript and offered their observations, I began to recognise where it needed greater clarity, correction or development. Sometimes a character’s motivation needed strengthening. Elsewhere, a scene needed room to breathe.

I also realised that characters alone could not bring this world to life. They needed to inhabit a place the reader could experience: its smells and sounds, its colours and textures, the small details of everyday life. Those details gradually gave the story its atmosphere and helped me evoke Ceylon in 1942.

The first draft gave me the story. The years that followed helped me discover how to make the reader feel it.

The Ghost Behind the Choices

K.M. Weiland, whose books guide writers through the craft of storytelling, poses an important question: what is your character’s ghost, and how does it affect their character arc?

Her argument begins with a familiar human contradiction. We are survivors, drawn towards life, comfort and peace. Yet we can also be self-destructive. We may become so determined to protect one part of our lives that we sacrifice another. Often, we remain deliberately blind to the damage we cause, rationalising our actions and convincing ourselves—and sometimes others—that the end justifies the means.

In other words, we lie to ourselves. But behind that lie lies a reason: something that explains why we protect one part of our existence at the expense of another. Find that reason, Weiland suggests, and you will find the ghost.

Divided Loyalties in a World at War

Day of the Sun God is, in many ways, a story filled with such ghosts. In the Ceylon of 1942 that I sought to portray, loyalties were complicated and often divided. Among the island’s elite and ordinary folk, differing attitudes towards empire, independence, identity and belonging shaped what people feared, whom they trusted and where they placed their allegiance.

As I developed the characters, their wants and fears became a way of exploring those competing convictions. What did each stand to lose? What were they trying to preserve? And what could they persuade themselves to justify when the things they valued came under threat?

Through their choices, I wanted to explore how people might think and behave as they were drawn into a war they had never wanted. Their ghosts belonged to the past, but those ghosts helped determine what they would do next.

The World the Reader Creates

As I bring this article to a close, I find myself reflecting on the boundary between the world we live in and believe to be real, and the imagined worlds we willingly enter when we open a book.

There is something distinctive about reading. In a film or television series, the characters and their surroundings take visible form before us. A book invites us to create those images for ourselves. The writer provides the words, but each reader gives them faces, voices, colours and textures, drawing on their own memories and imagination.

The same book can therefore inhabit many different minds in many different ways. We follow the same story, yet the world each of us enters is, in some measure, our own creation.

As I write, I remain mindful of the reader’s role in bringing this imagined world to life. Through my other writings, I also try to make clear that  Day of the Sun God, though rooted in history, inhabits a world of my invention. It invites readers to imagine what might have happened, while recognising that the story is rooted in real events! .

The story is authored by Tyron Devotta and edited by ChatGPT