Making use of memory - The realities of nonfiction and memoir - Long-form genres

Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Making use of memory
The realities of nonfiction and memoir
Long-form genres

Several types of memory are useful for writing memoir and nonfiction: memory for events, for facts, for how to do things, and working memory, which holds ideas in your head just long enough to turn them over. Each of these is malleable, and they’re all mysterious, which you don’t really realize until they fail you.

When writing creative nonfiction, it’s your task to rediscover important memories, make sense of them, and write about them in a way that’s interesting to your reader. Memories also help define who we are as human beings and why we are the way we are. It’s your memories that define your sense of self. Without memories, you have no past experience. You are continually living in the moment, without any sense of past experience. When writing creative nonfiction, especially a memoir, your job is to rediscover the important memories.

WATCH OUT!

Memory can be faulty. Often you won’t remember all the details or get the details wrong. In this case, you must rely on emotional truth and fact checking.

You piece together your memories from the fragments of life’s events that you’ve retained to understand who you are. The difficulty is to recapture these memories and make sense of them.

Many personal essay collections and all memoirs are based on the writer’s memories. However, because memory can be faulty, you must try to get the facts right to the best of your ability. Other times writing about memories involves writing about the emotional truth. This involves gathering the facts as best as you can, but then filling in the details using your emotional truth, or what seems right to you emotionally.

In other words, if it’s true to you on an emotional level, you can write about it as if it is the truth. After all, it’s more important to analyze why you remember a particular memory than what you remember. It’s possible to make sense of a memory by describing it in relation to something else.

IDEAS AND INSPIRATION

You can write about memory as a simile. Some memories are vague, like dreams. Others are vivid, like a photograph. Many memories are not understood, like an abstract painting. You can also write about memories as metaphors. A diary is a memory. A photograph is a memory. A personal journal is a memory. Home videos are memories.

Rediscover your memories, make sense of them, and write about them in a creative way. Memories provide the details you need to add to your life story to make it believable and to re-create the experience in your reader’s mind. By unlocking one memory, you can discover other memories and sift through them to find useful, interesting, and surprising facts. You can then use your memories to write that collection of personal essays, an autobiography, or a memoir.