Between Fact and Fiction
The stories we tell
Hi friends,
This is the first of my posts focusing on the blurred line between fact and fiction, both in our own lives and in the stories we write. This is a subject I plan to explore more over the coming months and I would love to know what you think about it, so please do let me know in the comments or by replying to the email.
Memory is a shape-shifter.
In mythology, folklore and speculative fiction, shape-shifting is the ability to change physical form at will.
Memories distort, mutate, and change over time. We tell ourselves a version of the things that happened so many times that, whether it was the truth of it or not, it becomes it in our minds. Can memory ever be said to be truly reliable when it can shift shape, texture and meaning, like this?
Memories hide.
There’s debate in the scientific field about whether they really exist, but repressed memories, or what the mental health industry calls dissociative amnesia, keep traumatic events hidden from your everyday consciousness. Sometimes they stay hidden for your entire life, sometimes they don’t.
I know they exist as mine came back to me. But the mind is an unfathomable thing. After I went through an intense period in my late 30s and early 40s dealing with the resurfacing of memories from my abusive childhood, I realised that I had always known even if I hadn’t been able to consciously acknowledge that.
Once I started looking into the behaviours of people who have repressed memories — black and white thinking, mental and physical health issues, substance abuse (although I just liked to call it a lot of partying!) — I recognised me all throughout my teenage years, 20s and 30s.
In researching this piece, I discovered the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) scale, which identifies the types of trauma that can cause repressed memories, and I had experienced 8 out of 10 of them before the age of sixteen. It’s no wonder my mind had tucked things away in secret pockets where it hoped they could no longer hurt me.
But if memories can bury themselves away like this, how can we ever know if our memories are trustworthy?
Memories define who we are.
The story we tell of our lives is the one that makes us who we are. The memories we have of what came before, are what has brought us to where we are now. Without our memories to define us who are we?
Who am I is a question that I started to ask myself when I started to meditate. I did an online meditation course with Peter Russell and in this, he urged me to meditate on this question. I watched a documentary series, Missing Links with Greg Braden, and he invited me to ask myself that question too. It was coming up in all of the books I was reading by spiritual teachers such as Thich Nhat Hahn and Pema Chödrön.
So I started to sit and ponder on that question. The answer I came up with is that all of the different labels I have — woman, wife, friend, daughter, writer, etc. — are not who I essentially am. They are the things I am experiencing in this human life. So my memories and the stories I tell about myself, don’t define who I am either. They describe the things that have happened to me, what I have witnessed, and the emotions I have felt.
And all of this is true for the characters we write too.
Telling our characters’ stories
What I have come to learn over the past 15 years of writing fiction, and then teaching the writing of it, is that the stories our characters are telling themselves about who they are is at the heart of everything. Yes we may have a plot and inciting incident that carries the story — sets it off and drives it on — but these are just tools we use to do the real work of fiction, which is to explore an aspect of being human.
And the stories our characters are telling themselves about who they are, come from the memories they have and the story of their life those memories have created for them.
As we have seen, memories shift shape, they hide, they’re inherently unreliable, and yet we tend to believe they are the truth and what make us who we are. I think when we write fictional characters, we tend to ignore this fact about being human. We write stories that stay mostly on surface. We don’t dig deep enough. I don’t think we do it deliberately. Our subconscious minds do it to keep us safe, as it’s scary down there. In digging deep into our characters, we are essentially mining our own vulnerabilities. Putting them on page for all to see. Which doesn’t mean that we just write ourselves in our stories. Far from it.
I believe that the characters we write come to us to show us the things we need to see, to process, to feel, to help us live more fully and move closer to an understanding of what being human is all about.
What reality actually is can’t really be defined though, as it’s different for everyone and we can never know exactly what other people see, feel, hear, experience. But in writing, and reading, stories we can try and understand others and ourselves, and find the best way to travel through this human journey.
And that’s what the characters in our stories need to do. So we must use the vital role that memory plays in how this human experience plays out for us, to write the truth for our characters as they know it.
I’m going to leave you this week with a writing prompt, to start digging beneath the surface of your character and helping them to mine their memories so you know what their story is really about.
I’d love to know your thoughts on all of this - please do let me know!
With love,
Writing Prompt
Spend some time with the protagonist on a story you are currently working on and ask them these questions. Write the answers in their first person voice, even if you’re not using that point of view in the story, and try to write full, detailed answers rather than bullets or short notes. Before you start, sit quietly for a moment and really connect with your character in your mind. Let them come through you to answer these questions.
What is your earliest memory? How does it make you feel when you recall it?
What is your happiest memory? What about it makes it shine for you?
What is your worst memory? Why is it this one that comes to mind when I ask you that question?
Do you have a memory that keeps coming to mind all the time? Why do you think it is doing that? What might it be trying to tell you?
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Peter Russell is wonderful. That course with him must have been great!
Thank you for the post, with so many things to reflect on, and especially the writing promt - it immediately made me rethink a character as I was reading through your questions.
Thanks for sharing Amanda. An insightful, personal read, that also chimes with me in many ways, including the fascination with memory. I'm editing my first novel, Heartwood, which explores memory and how - based on some research I read - the same part of the brain that's used for making sense of the past is also used for creating an idea of the future, and that you cannot have that future projection without forming some sort of narrative and understanding of the past. One of the books I used for research was Memory, an anthology by Harriet Harvey Wood and AS Byatt. A real 'dip in and reflect' kind of read.