She was sitting on a couch. On the wall across from her there was what appeared to be a logo: "Relax. Everything is OK."
A man with long pointy ears opened a door beside her. "Hello? It's your turn. Come in, will you please?"
She entered his spacious office and sat on a plush leather chair. He sat in a swivel chair behind a big desk, taking out a thin folder with papers. "You probably have many questions."
"No, not really," she said.
"I see you were on earth for ... 350 years?" He flipped through the papers in his folder, concerned. "I'm sorry, this report looks like nonsense."
"No, that's right." She ran her finger over the arm of the chair, admiring the texture of the leather. "I was alive for 30 years, then was a ghost for another 320."
He stared at her, reordering his impressions. "Well, we here are on the next ... you do realize you're dead, right?"
"Ghost for 320 years ..."
"I mean, not actually on earth anymore."
"What's with the ears? I haven't seen those before."
"Oh they're eyestalks, I can see behind me with tiny eyes at the tips."
"Really."
"Very popular in the 2700's."
"Ah after my time."
"OK. Right." He gathered his papers and straightened them, apparently satisfied. "We here are on the next level. Most people are discarded or recycled after life, but the system seems to think you are good at what we need."
"You need a ghost who haunts a bookstore and writes novels that nobody ever reads?"
He stared at her again, this time in amazement. "Oh. My ... Wow." He asked, trying to be casual, "... why did you do that?"
"Because the characters wanted me to?"
He sat back. Tears almost came to his eyes. "Yes. Well. We may be able to fit you in. You see, this IS the next level. Life on earth, it's experienced as life. But really, it's a simulation, highly crafted and guided by experts working here. We do a run, it doesn't quite work right, we adjust things, we run it again."
"Like Groundhog Day."
"Not like Groundhog Day. None of the people know they've done it a thousand times before, each time slightly different. They have free will, that is, they make all their own decisions, true to themselves. But we arrange the situations to try to tell stories that we like."
She sat forward, suddenly interested. "You're telling me this is heaven?"
"Yes."
"And my job in heaven is not to sing hymns, but to write STORIES?"
"Yes."
"And ...", a-hah, she thought, there's the hitch. "... so, what kind of stories do you like?"
"Now that's a very good question," he said, sitting up and spinning his chair around a few times. The ears really did have little black dots at the tips. She tried flipping him the bird when he was facing away. "Yes I saw that."
"Stories," she prompted.
"Well, they're an art form. We've got comedies, tragedies, adventures, thrillers. Different teams work on different things. There are lots of different uses for stories. For example YOU come from a story. What we're looking for, here, is building stories where the characters treat each other well, enjoy themselves, and yet the stories are still not boring."
She opened her mouth, rapidly thinking through her last fifty novels. About thirty-five of which matched that description. "... I might be able to do that."
"Our CURRENT project, which we're having trouble with ..."
"Yes?"
"Is to tell the story of a happy marriage."
This was in response to a prompt on reddit.com r/WritingPrompts, "Write a story without using any names or titles".