WILLIAM Faulkner said about writing, “Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency. If a writer had to rob his mother, he will not hesitate.” He further said, not without humor, that the “Ode to a Grecian Urn” might be worth any number of old ladies.
Faulkner would be amused to know that aspiring writers everywhere have “stolen” snippets of everyday life for a budding story. This is especially useful, since people in general cannot remember absolutely everything that happens in a day. Many an episode I have done so myself, pen and paper in hand, recording that fleeting retort or that witty comment by some passerby, only to forget it.
Always being seen with a notebook like it was an appendage is unusual enough, without people knowing what is in it. In fairness to the people I “hound” material, I do not write their sentences word for word. I guess what I really record are the ideas behind their words, the mood, the feel. I only take their exchanges down because the words inspire me, much as how a great book not only makes someone turn its pages, but also compels that person to put the book down and start writing. But this is where I fail as a chronicler: how do I retell the entirety of the person’s ideas, without saying things as he did? The replication of another person’s thought is impossible—I might be looking down the same busy intersection as my friend, but we would be thinking different things. What I am recording is my experience of these moments, not the other person’s, even if I write my friend’s opinion on harrier drivers.
Science fiction writer Samuel Delany says it isn’t really my job to take note of every glance and sigh that occurs in one moment. In a recent interview, he bemoans the fact that most of the time, memories in stories are nothing more than testimonials of previous events.
For instance, Delany says, when a person tries to recall an event, he would only manage to do a few seconds’ worth of reminiscing. The present, he says, will always intrude—which is why a character remembering three months’ worth of memories while walking down a street is illogical.
“What I object to,” he says, “is the scene whose only reason is to serve as the frame for an anterior scene because the writer has been too lazy to think through carefully how that anterior scene might begin and end.” In reality, flashbacks only last anywhere between half a second to ten seconds, and Delany tells budding writers to keep that in mind.
The lesson here is that although a book is presented in a neat little package, one page after another leading to a conclusion, fiction is “an experience on the order of memory—not on the order of actual occurrence.” The writer is tasked with telling you a story, not with recounting events as they happened like a trial witness. A writer does not bait with solid, irrefutable facts. He baits with words that evoke striking images, which will make the reader remember his own experiences. Human memory, after all, is unstable—they are stocked with no rhyme or reason, with some memories combining, and some disappearing altogether. This, in effect, gives the reader a ‘false memory’—he remembers things that did not happen to him. Delany says that the writer’s job is to “make that unreal memory as clear and vivid as possible.” Give the readers the power to recall the picturesque view on top of Mt. Banahaw, or the curse of remembering a grisly shoot-out in Tondo.
It doesn’t matter, then, if I write moments down to the last hair, or if I just make a sketch of what happened. What matters is how I present those memories, how I make them fall in place one after the other, spinning them together until they become real, false memories.
