How do you remember?

when writing fiction feels more like remembering than invention

Tickets are still on sale for Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice. If a longer payment plan than three months would make this course financially accessible to you, or if you would like to be put on a waiting list for pay-what-you-can tickets, email KR at krmoorhead.lit@gmail.com.

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It turns out that some people have vivid memories of very specific scenes from their growing up and early adulthood. They remember events, days, people in detail, almost as though they are seeing whole scenes played back in front of their mind’s eye.

That’s not at all how I remember, though I didn’t realize this until I was talking to my friend KR about something personal they are writing, and they said, “I don’t really have many specific memories of my childhood. Maybe just a couple of handfuls.” I started to think about my own childhood, and realized that I only have a small number of actual memories as well—actual memories as in scenes running like a film in my mind. This is how memory is usually depicted in the movies or on TV: just another scene, like any other, with setting, character, dialogue. Usually there’s some sort of filter—some trick of light or color or focus that sets these “memory” scenes off from the present action, but otherwise, it’s a fully-fleshed out scene like any other.

Is this how most people remember? I have often said that various parts of my past feel less like a life I actually lived and more like a film I once saw. But that’s not exactly right, either. It’s actually more like a film I have mostly forgotten, but still feel the vibe of, with vivid memories of just a few specific scenes. The rest of it has sort of faded to black and white, and feels too distant to actually “see.” As though I’m remembering through a cataract. Or as though the film is taking place in a Truman Show-sized snow globe that has been shaken up, and I am watching from the outside. There’s a whole world in there, but I can’t quite see it.

Poor memory, and especially poor short-term working memory, is one of the hallmark traits of various non-normative neurotypes, especially ADHD. I’ve certainly never been very good at memorizing meaningless, unconnected strings of data, as opposed to systems, structures, patterns. When I was studying Spanish in college, I was very very good at grammar, which came naturally to me, but I could rarely remember enough individual words to plug into the grammar in order to have an actual conversation. Instead, I would sit silently by listening to classmates and correct their grammar in my head. But back then, I did have a very good memory of a different sort, an almost spooky ability to recreate word-for-word conversations. This of course was extremely tedious for anyone with whom I had a disagreement about what had happened—”No, actually, what you said was ….” And then I would repeat it back to them literally word-for-word. It was good for winning arguments, probably less so for making friends.

But even that acute sort of memory has very much faded with age, and now what I have mostly is a vague sense of the past, with a handful of actual “scenes” sprinkled throughout.

I only realized recently, when talking to KR, that this way of remembering various eras of my life as a vibe, or gestalt, is also how worlds of fiction appear to me. Sometimes writers say that they don’t know the story until they start writing it, and then the story tells them what happens, and/or the characters tell them who they are. Often these writers are surprised at what the story and the characters tell them. “Oh, I didn’t know she had a sister until suddenly she revealed it to me as I was writing,” a writing partner recently said to me. I do understand this sense of surprise that comes from the act of writing, but to me it has always felt less like the characters or the story telling me something I didn’t know, and more like me remembering it.

The world of my fictional stories very much appear to me, almost like a vision, whole and fully formed, but opaque. They are shrouded in fog or snow, and writing becomes an act of shining a light on what already exists. The sitting and staring out of windows part—which is by far the most time-consuming part of my fiction-writing process—feels a lot like letting the snow settle so I can see, or remember, more clearly what already exists. The writing it down part often feels like a somewhat tedious necessity.

The beauty of this sort of fiction-as-vibe and writing-as-remembering is that, perhaps paradoxically, the “vision,” the “vibe,” the “gestalt,” never leaves me. It is always there, ready to be remembered. Right now I am writing a British murder mystery which I started in 2021 and then abandoned for two years for a variety of reasons. I have worried about a lot of things with this story, especially having to do with how politically problematic a traditional police procedural is, but I have never worried that the story would leave me. It is all there, fully formed, I just need to blow away the fog to find it, or rather to remember it. But the time elapsed from when that vision came to me and when I write it down is of no consequence—once it reveals itself to me, it is there, forever available.

How do you remember? Do you have lots of clear, distinct memories of the past? What is the relationship of memory and creation for you?

Tickets are still on sale for Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice. If a longer payment plan than three months would make this course financially accessible to you, or if you would like to be put on a waiting list for pay-what-you-can tickets, email KR at krmoorhead.lit@gmail.com.