Ghost
Ghost
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Jason Reynolds on Ghost
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Track, not basketball, and the many ways we runThe publisher came to Reynolds with a brief: write a sports series for younger readers, and make it basketball. He turned that down on principle, not preference.
They wanted me to do basketball, and I just feel like when it comes to black kids, we do more than play basketball. Like it’s always ‘Can you write a story about a basketball player or some kids on a basketball court?’ And I was just kinda like ‘Eh…’ Been there, done that... I felt like track would be cool because so many of us are dealing with the concept of running, whether it’s running away from something, running towards something, running your family.
Once Reynolds settled on track, he needed to explain why the sport could carry more weight than a setting. At the 2017 AWP Book Fair, he connected the physical act of running to the psychological condition of Castle Crenshaw, a twelve-year-old carrying his father’s violence in his body.
Running in general is the acceptance of suffocation. It’s the ability to grow comfortable with the feeling of suffocating. That’s what it means to run, and to run well. And there are kids all over the country who have grown comfortable with the feeling of suffocation, who do not know that suffocation is not normal. And that is what you get when you get a character like Castle Crenshaw. [paraphrased from audio]
The night that made Castle who he is, when his father came after him and his mother with a gun, was not invented. Reynolds pulled it directly from a close friend’s life, someone who had lived through it at roughly Castle’s age.
Reynolds has said he doesn’t write to teach, but he does write toward something. When he talks about why trauma had to have a destination in this book, he is also explaining the obligation he felt to the friend whose story he borrowed.
I hate the fact that we’re so afraid of trauma, right? Because the reality is that all of us are going to experience some semblance of trauma in our lives. But if we’re going to talk about trauma, then we have to talk about triumph on the other side of it. [paraphrased from audio]
How he wrote it
A person first, then the complicationReynolds doesn’t open a new book with a plot outline. He starts with a specific person living in a specific world, and lets conflict follow from that. He described the sequence to the NEA in 2020.
the first thing I do is invent a person. Who’s telling the story? And then what complicates that person’s life? Then I think about what’s the environment and what’s the relationship between the environment, this person, and the conflict. From there, I start to build the story.
Coach, the adult mentor who recruits Castle onto a track team, could easily have become the book’s moral mouthpiece. Reynolds built him to avoid exactly that. At the AWP panel, he laid out the distinction between an adult who instructs and one who opens doors.
Coach doesn’t force his hand. Coach presents options. Right? And I think that’s the thing that young people need more than anything. It’s not about me forcing you to do anything you don’t want to do, it’s about me making sure you understand the options at play. Right? That you have decisions to make and those decisions lead you down this path, this path, and the multitude of paths in the middle, but that you do have options, and I think that’s the beauty of their relationship in the book. [paraphrased from audio]
Reynolds spent years writing poetry before he wrote novels, and that training left a visible mark on how his characters speak. He is deliberate about finding words that a kid with a limited emotional vocabulary might reach for, words that end up doing more than standard speech allows.
I love to turn nouns into verbs. I love the idea of using language. A lot of my books use language in that way, where you know, if a kid is saying that he’s upset, the kid’ll just say that he has so much scream in him. That’s a thing that I love, love, love, love, love to do.
Readers of Ghost will recognize the phrase. The line is not an accident of voice; it is the result of Reynolds deliberately building an emotional vocabulary from the ground up for a narrator who doesn’t have an adult’s words for what he carries.
The personal thread
The hardest audience, and why that mattersReynolds grew up in Oxon Hill, Maryland, finding language through rap rather than novels. He didn’t read a book cover to cover until he was seventeen. When he visits schools and juvenile detention centers, he is meeting, repeatedly, the readers he had in mind when he wrote Castle Crenshaw, and he knows exactly how demanding they are.
[When told Ghost is the most popular fictional book among middle schoolers:] “I didn’t know that, man, that makes me happy though, you know. They’re the hardest audience. They’re the hardest audience, so if it works it works.” [paraphrased from audio]
Reynolds has talked about watching a young reader finish Ghost and immediately want to know what came next. He connected that moment to his own history with language, and to what he hoped a book could do beyond the story it contained.
I always tell people, I don’t need every kid to sort of bite down and only read Jason Reynolds’ books. What I would love to have happen is... a Jason Reynolds’ book perhaps is a springboard, a gateway into the world of literacy, into the world of literature. Because whether he reads my novels or not, his relationship with language will change who he is chemically as a person. [paraphrased from audio]
On the reader
Two different kids picking up the same bookReynolds draws a consistent line between the book’s two possible readers: the kid who has lived something like Castle’s circumstances and needs to see that acknowledged, and the kid who hasn’t and may have been taught to be afraid of that world. In a 2020 NEA interview, he named what the book is meant to do for each.
Ultimately, I’m not interested in teaching much of anything. Not because I don’t care, but because that’s just not what I write books for. For me, it’s all about acknowledgement, it’s all about bearing witness to young people’s lives.
Writing Castle as a complete person, not a symbol of adversity, was not a stylistic preference. It was a response to what Reynolds sees as a widespread failure in how fiction for young people gets made. He made the argument plainly to Krista Tippett on On Being.
I’m not interested — look, I write that which I believe is real and things that happen, and I don’t want to shy away from things that are complicated and tough, but I also want to write whole stories about whole people. I think sometimes we reduce children and young people to half-formed things, and so we write half-formed stories about them.
Reynolds returns to this point across interviews: the goal is not a lesson delivered to the reader, but a feeling of being genuinely seen. He told SXSW EDU in 2020 what that looks like in practice.
I’m not trying to give away messages, I’m not trying to teach nobody nothing... Ultimately though, I just want young people to feel cared for, I want them to feel like somebody sees them for who they are, not who they are projected to be. That means more to me than any lesson.
Reynolds has held this position from the beginning. When VOX ATL asked him directly what he wants teenagers to take from Ghost, his answer came without qualifications.
I’ve never wanted to teach lessons. I never wanted to talk down to teenagers. I’m not here to teach you anything. All I want to do is create stories, specifically in this story, where you can read it and be like, ‘Yo, he looks like me, sounds like me, he’s dealing with some things that I may be dealing with, whether that’s fear or anger or trauma, and just feel safe and comfortable with somebody who’s similar to me.’ That’s it. I’m not here to say ‘Don’t do this’ or ‘Do this.’ I’m just here to say: Look in the mirror and see yourself, and see that you’re not alone.
What he wants us to sit with
Not a lesson, but a mirrorReynolds has spent years visiting schools and detention centers, which means he has met the real Castle Crenshaws long before and long after writing the book. That proximity shapes what he thinks fiction owes a young reader, and it is something other than instruction.
I’m not interested — look, I write that which I believe is real and things that happen, and I don’t want to shy away from things that are complicated and tough, but I also want to write whole stories about whole people. I think sometimes we reduce children and young people to half-formed things, and so we write half-formed stories about them.
The question of what Ghost does for a reader who has never touched anything like Castle’s circumstances sits alongside the question of what it does for a reader who has. Reynolds described what he wants each to walk away carrying.
Ultimately, I’m not interested in teaching much of anything. Not because I don’t care, but because that’s just not what I write books for. For me, it’s all about acknowledgement, it’s all about bearing witness to young people’s lives.
For Reynolds, bearing witness is itself the argument. The book does not resolve Castle’s world or explain it away. It stays present with him, and asks the reader to do the same.