Neil Jopson's Blog

Read a ghost story this summer. It's short. And for 5 days it's free.

In the words of one Goodreads reviewer: "Ohhh...this is a good one!"

Find out why and treat yourself to the freebie.

Download your free kindle edition of The Tarn from Amazon between 16th and 20th July 2025.

US copies here

UK copies here

Thank you everyone who entered the Goodreads giveaway for The Tarn. It was great to see so many of you enter!

Congratulations to the winners. Thanks in particular to those who left reviews after reading; it means a lot.

Don't forget, if you didn't win this time, you can buy it here in the UK and here in the US.

I've written a new short story for you. I hope you like it!

The second in my Short Stories series, it's not a supernatural tale this time. Though the past is haunting its pages.

Here's a taster from the blurb:

A sunken city. A woman with a secret. A treasure to be found.

Ren has spent her life diving on the ruins left by the Ancients. Recovering artefacts while hiding from the world above the waterline.

Now she's been given her biggest salvage job yet. But will bringing up the relics of history lead to revelations about her own past?

Ancient History - available on Kindle on 30th June 2025.

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Ancient History

Don’t trust authors. That was the advice given by C.S. Lewis in his essay It All Began with a Picture…. He didn’t mean you should watch your wallet around literary types. Nor that that writers were somehow more dishonest than the rest of the population. But it was a health warning.

Writers, he said, were too caught up in the creative act to be able to give an accurate account of it. This was particularly true for any explanation they might give of how they found inspiration. Happily, warning given, Lewis tried to explain as honestly as he could where his own inspiration came from. And the little account he produced, tucked into the pages of his collection of essays Of This and Other Worlds, provides us with a few gems we can use to inspire our own work:

1. Inspiration can come from anywhere. Lewis describes how the Narnia series came from a simple image. A picture that appeared in his mind. The same happened with his space trilogy. Narnia came from the vision of a fawn standing in a snowy wood. A whole universe was born.

An image may not pop fully formed into our own heads. But we live in a visual world. Glance through magazines, newspapers, the internet. Experiment with AI to create images. Does a picture catch your eye. Write a story about it. Describe what is happening. See where it takes you.

2. Inspiration doesn’t have to be new. An old memory, object, or thought you tucked away decades ago might be waiting to be used. Lewis had the fawn in his head for over 20 years before it became the inspiration for a children’s classic.

3. Just start writing. Lewis had no idea what his story would be when he started writing about the fawn. But he just went for it. And don’t forget…

4. Choosing to act on inspiration leads to more inspiration. Aslan, the core of the Narnia stories, suddenly appeared once Lewis started writing. Don’t know where your story is going? You’ll never find out if you don’t start writing! And you can use the method in point 1 again to help at any point in a story. Remember, inspiration can also be a word, phrase, image, memory. Anything really.

Lewis describes writing as an all-consuming act. We too need to throw our entire selves into it. Ignoring doubt, anxiety or second guessing. Remember inspiration is about getting those ideas down on paper (or into pixels). The fine tuning comes later. Whether we are going to write a thriller or create great literature we need to have something to work with, an initial draft of our story. Inspiration helps us to produce that raw material. Inspiration is not magic. We can work with it. We can create with it. And we can find it anywhere.

The idea for The Tarn germinated in the hinterland of my memory. I thought I’d read a tale nearly 30 years before, about a boatman who terrorised Windermere. In my mind a hooded figure loomed like the ferryman to Hades, Death, or the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. But when I looked the old tale up it turned out my memory was wrong. I’d been provided with the cornerstone of my story, but the material it was formed from had no hooded figure in it at all. Not that it mattered, it still helped me create my first ‘ghost story.’

The misremembered tale did involve ferrymen, Windermere and terrorised residents. It was said to have taken place on the route of the current car ferry at Bowness Nab. Originally the ferry was a rowboat and the ferrymen, living in cottages along the banks of Windermere, would respond to the needs of travellers as and when they arrived. One night, as the foul weather kept the ferrymen snuggly in the local pub, a voice could be heard calling over the lake. Whether he needed the money or felt a sense of duty, one ferryman decided to cross the water and fetch the poor traveller caught out in the storm. It was a while before he returned, alone, pale and unable to speak, dying hours later. It was said that the voice could be heard calling during stormy nights; though no ferryman was foolish enough to heed it. Eventually a priest was called in to perform an exorcism and banish the spirit (if that is what it was) to a quarry; where it remains to this day….

It's a great tale, one among many to be found in the Lake District. Writing about it has caused a few more ideas to form for stories of my own. Maybe it sparked one or two for you. Don’t forget you can use my summary of MR James’s guidelines for writing an English ghost story to help you if you fancy trying your hand at writing it down. I also hope that I might have encouraged you to visit what I believe is one of the most beautiful places in the world; the English Lake District. Be warned though: there might be strange spirits about. And there definitely will be a chance of rain.
The TarnThe TarnNeil JopsonMontague Rhodes James

Water is a great place for a lost spirit. And the tarns of the Lake District are no exception. Within walking distance of Grasmere, there are three said to host spirits.

· Easedale Tarn already has a mark against it, being unpopular with none other than Wordsworth. He thought of it as a place of bad weather and dull sky. But maybe he also heard that there was a lost soul trapped there, constantly trying to find its way to the spirit world.

· If one lost soul is not enough, head higher up and reach Codale Tarn. This tarn not only has a soul searching for freedom; they say that if you look closely into its surface, you can see the dead staring back. As the waters from Codale flow down to Easedale, one can’t help but wonder if the lost soul of Easedale is the same one as Codale, desperately travelling from one to the other in its search for the next world. As for the faces of the dead, Codale is about as far away from the living as you can get in England. The Perfect place if you are hoping for eternal rest.

· Alcock Tarn lies on the other side of Grasmere. This piece of water was expanded by and named after James Alcock in the 19th century. The story goes that if you stand on the shoreline in the evening, you may see a mysterious spirit appear out of the mist or reflected in the light of the moon.

These are all great tales, yet none of them directly inspired my short story The Tarn. But there was one tale I heard when I was a schoolboy that stuck with me and influenced my little story of terror. It was in the Lake District, and it was on water, but it wasn’t on a tarn.

But that’s a topic for my next blog post.

I have been asked, is 'The Tarn' based on a real place?

The answer is both yes and no.

'The Tarn' is set somewhere near Keswick, and includes elements of personal recollections of time spent tramping around the English Lake District. Tarns always fascinated me as a child. Dark patches of unfathomable water dropped amongst the craggy rocks and windy peaks. There was the way the sunlight seemed to shatter into a thousand diamonds when it hit the surface on a beautiful day. How that surface could lie as flat as a tarmacked car park, or gently ripple as a gust of wind skidded over it. And it is delightful yet unsurprising to find that they have fascinated many generations before me.

In the folklore of the Lake District there are two tarns not far from Keswick, that have supernatural tales attached to them. Unlike the figure in my story, there is nothing menacing about these legends. Rather they are enchanting, and a chance to think about the people who once lived in the area. The stories told before railways and motorways made access by outsiders so much easier.

Nestled in the steep sides of Saddleback are Bowscale and Scales Tarn. Two miles separate them. Scales Tarn is alleged to be bottomless. And it is said that if you look at the water at midday, you will see the stars of night laid out before you. As I wrote earlier, I have seen the surface of tarns glitter in the sunlight on many of my walks, so I can well imagine how this story came to be.

Bowscale, meanwhile, is said to be home to a pair of immortal fish. They even get a shout out from Wordsworth, who describes

'…the undying fish that swim
Through Bowscale-tarn….'

Two tarns with a touch of mystery. But it is a sense of charm, rather than terror, that these tales leave us with. And that reflects the experience of walking in the Lake District. Once you get away from the honeypots, and the crowd of tourists thins out, there is enchantment. Even when the rain descends so heavily it destroys the boundary between earth and sky and you feel like one of those fish in Bowscale. Destroying the boundaries between heaven and earth is what the Lake District is good at. Just ask Wordsworth and friends.

MR James created some of the greatest English ghost stories. An academic at King’s College Cambridge, his straightforward, spine-tingling tales were written at the beginning of the 20th century. If you’ve ever wanted to write your own English style ghost story, the good news is MR James left a clear blueprint for you to follow.

Here is his method:

1. Use an everyday setting. Somewhere your readers are “fairly familiar” with. Somewhere safe and mundane.

2. The ghost should be malevolent. No Casper the friendly ghost or lost soul trying to right the wrongs of the past. Unquestionable evil is the name of the game.

3. The living characters should be normal people. Men and women like yourself and your friends and colleagues. No superheroes or ghostbusting exorcists. How would Jim from HR react when confronted with an evil spirit?

4. Build tension. James described it as “the nicely managed crescendo.” Start with a normal day, a normal setting, a normal person. A “placid” scene, “undisturbed by forebodings.” Then gradually allow the evil to intrude, until it dominates the story.

5. Don’t make it too contemporary, but keep it recent. “A slight haze of distance is desirable. ‘Thirty years ago,’ ‘not long before the war’….” Today we could set it “Not long after 9/11,’ ‘just before the 2012 Olympics,’ ‘a week or two after the Brexit vote,’ etc. Familiar, but just that little bit removed from the contemporary atmosphere.

6. Objects are important as the vehicle of evil. For James it could be a whistle, a tree, or a book. They’re not obviously unusual or strange items.

7. The short story is the best format for the ghost story. It needs to be well crafted and pack a punch.

8. Don’t over explain the ghost or malevolent force. Leave questions unanswered. The reader should put down the story with a lingering sense of mystery alongside the unease.

9. For it to be a specifically English ghost story, avoid the shock and gore. MR James describes his approach as ‘reticence.’ “Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it, and there is much blatancy in a lot of recent stories.”

10. And remember: the sole reason for writing a ghost story is to create “a pleasing terror in the reader.” Think about your reader throughout the writing process.

These tips are all taken from MR James’ own writing. My story The Tarn is modelled on James’ style. I wrote it after I read his collected stories, but before I read his thoughts on how a ghost story should be constructed. I feel I have hit most of his points. It would be great to hear what you think.

Anyway, why don’t you have a go at writing a ghost story? It’s a fun way to spend your time.

The Tarn

Montague Rhodes James