Why Can't They Remember?!

It’s one of the most disappointing things. You excitedly present the next instalment of your story to your writing group, your writing buddy, your friend who’s eagerly reading alongside your writing. You can’t wait for their reaction: their shock at your Dramatic Reveal, their thrill at the plot twist, their emotion at the most moving thing you’ve ever written…

Instead, they’re drawing a blank. They can’t remember who the character even is or confuse them with someone completely different. They’ve forgotten that plot thread, so your carefully constructed Dramatic Reveal lands with all the impact of a wet dish cloth. They’re asking “Is this about X character?” when it’s clearly five hundred years before: for crying out loud, it even says so on the page, right there, in the middle of that paragraph, see? “Five hundred years”. And that character: there was a whole scene about her, in chapter four! And that Dramatic Reveal: you have your notes from before; one of them spotted your foreshadowing and guessed what was coming! Are they even reading your writing? How can they not remember?!

Sometimes, in writing group, we’ve discussed whether it’s because we’re not reading like “real” readers. “Real” readers don’t have to wait a week or a fortnight for the next instalment; they can just turn the page. “Real” readers aren’t following the story over a couple of years; they might finish the book in a month, a week, or even a single day of holiday.

It’s true, we’re not reading like “real” readers. We’re reading with our pens out, underlining favourite bits, spotting repetitions, scribbling notes in the margin. We’re going back over the whole section in group, discussing it at length. Sometimes we’re reading the same scene again, rewritten with its previous issues ironed out. We’re paying incredibly close attention.

And those “real” readers, with the complete book in their hand? They’re reading in the bath. On the bus or the tube. In bed with their eyes drooping. On the sofa, curled up with a head full of flu. (Like I am, right now!) They’re listening while they chop vegetables for dinner or while they navigate the traffic on their way to and from work.

Every time, the group comes to the same conclusion: the gaps in time are more than balanced out by the incredibly close attention we’re paying to each other’s work. So if we can’t remember those details, the “real” readers don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell.

Of course it’s frustrating and disappointing. Of course we’re tempted to pull up the exact passages that our writing buddies seem to have not even read or had wiped from their minds. But if they can’t remember, that’s a problem in the writing, which needs fixing in the writing.

As a teacher, I have a mantra: if a student doesn’t understand, that’s my fault, not theirs. It’s literally my job to help them understand. The same is true for us as writers: if readers don’t remember, that’s on us and it’s our job to help them. If two people in my group remember and one doesn’t, it still needs fixing. That’s a third of my readers confused, so why not make it clearer?

There are lots of things we want our readers to be wondering about. What’s going to happen next. If X is a bad ‘un or is going to turn out trustworthy. Whether Y and Z will end up together. If that’s a clue or a red herring. We want to save the reader’s headspace for all of that, not squander it with them trying to work out the basics of who characters are, what happened before, and when even is this. 

So when you hit a snag like this, resist the temptation to dismiss it as “time between instalments” or to show people the bit where you actually did include that info. Instead, commit to sorting it out. Write down what they couldn’t remember. Before you leap in with explanations, ask a few more questions: who did they think it was, when did they think this was happening: find out as much as you can, so you know what needs fixing.

Fixing it often means more than tweaking the scene they’re reading now. First, go back and rework the earlier scenes they’re misremembering or forgetting. Make those events so memorable and clear that they can’t possibly forget. Add new distinctive detail so those two characters can’t ever be confused for each other. Add strong sensory signifiers to ground the reader in a sense of the time, whether that’s “winter” or “five hundred years ago”. In last week’s Memory Hook Writing Skill, I gave these three examples of details I used to make things more memorable for the reader:

• A giant spider under a trapdoor, between the water and the raised floor of a house: legit terrifying, and a very helpful reminder of a character and situation we don’t see often. 
• Dried-up lemons: one character, for complicated past reasons, insists on always having a lemon, but can’t be parted from the old ones. So everywhere he goes, he carries the musty scent of dried-up lemons, and is usually visibly carrying a lemon.
• Sickly-sweet jasmine perfume: a complete overload of it, and also a handy signifier when the wearer is en-corpsed!

Enrich the original scene(s), to make it unforgettable.

Second, look at the in-between scenes. Check when that person / place / event was last mentioned, compared to the current scene where your readers got confused. If it was five dramatic chapters ago, they’re going to take longer to retrieve that memory. Can you weave in one or two more appearances or mentions of that place / person / event, in between? If you want an “Aha!” moment, it needs to be more accessible in their memories.

And third, tweak the current scene. Drawing on all that richness, weave in those distinctive reminders, so the memory rushes back in all its vivid glory. 

While it may be frustrating to encounter the problem, fixing it like this is blissfully rewarding. It’s not like ironing a bug out of some code or correcting a spelling error, a dutiful necessary task. It is rich with discovery and delight. As you go back to make those characters more memorable and find ways to sneak in reminders, they leap to fuller life than they ever did before. As you seed memory-hooks into that past scene and weave them in to the new one, both turn thick with vivid detail and new story possibilities. When the phrase “five hundred years before” isn’t registering and you make everything look, feel, smell like it’s five hundred years ago, you discover astonishing new depths to draw on.

And even if you had to bite your tongue so hard it hurt, when you were getting feedback, now you can loosen it to say thank you – because by flagging up the problem for you, they’ve helped you discover all this.

Then the next time you’re writing, you remember to create and seed those details in, which embeds them even deeper in the story and opens up richer story possibilities. And then, when you’re asking your friends if they remember X, they’re saying “Of course, how could I forget her? She’s the one…” and “Yes, absolutely! That was the bit where…”

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If you want whole rafts of techniques for orientating the reader in who characters are, what happened before, and when things are, the Orientating the Reader evergreen course will help you with exactly that. It’s full of hands-on activities, which you can use with your work in progress OR with the practice materials I give you. Click here to see more details and get started.

Writing Skill: Memory Hook

The right descriptive detail can act as a powerful anchor for the reader, the hook on which they hang their memory of a particular character, place, or moment – often even a combination. That's incredibly useful when you want to remind the reader of a key scene from earlier on in the story. And it's essential if your story has lots of characters or storylines for the reader to keep track of.

To work as a memory hook, the detail needs to be…

• unusual
• emotion-provoking / richly sensory
• specific

For example, these are three of the descriptive details I’ve used as memory hooks in one of my novels:

• A giant spider under a trapdoor, between the water and the raised floor of a house: legit terrifying, and a very helpful reminder of a character and situation we don’t see often. 
• Dried-up lemons: one character, for complicated past reasons, insists on always having a lemon, but can’t be parted from the old ones. So everywhere he goes, he carries the musty scent of dried-up lemons, and is usually visibly carrying a lemon.
• Sickly-sweet jasmine perfume: a complete overload of it, and also a handy signifier when the wearer is en-corpsed!

The first couple times your detail crops up, you want to describe it in full sensory richness as well as the character’s emotional / physical reaction to it, to really embed it in the reader’s memory. After that, you can often just reference it briefly, to trigger that memory. So, here’s what you’re going to do, to play with this technique.

If you have a story you're writing

• What’s a pivotal moment, character, or place that you want the reader to remember? Think especially of ones they have to hold onto in their memory for a while before it comes back into play.
• What pivotal detail can you add that’s unusual, emotive / sensory, and specific?
• Spend five minutes writing rich description of the detail for yourself, then five minutes looking at where you could weave it into that scene. (Feel free to spend longer on each half if you prefer.)

If you don’t have a story you're writing OR you want to try it out first

I’m going to give you the ultimate challenge for a reader’s memory – and for a writer’s writing: a CONVERSATION IN A ROOM. Little to do, little striking to see, often the bane of our writerly lives. So we need that descriptive detail to do some heavy lifting for us. (Both the jasmine perfume and the dried-up lemons were originally used for this.)

Here’s your situation: A and B are in the room together. A is telling B about a difficulty C is having – that could be romantic, financial, work-related, family, psychological, up to you. Spend five minutes first writing just their dialogue, to get a sense of the story and the context through writing to discover. If you’re writing by hand, draw a line vertically down the middle of the page and write the dialogue on the left-side only.

Next, think: What pivotal detail can you add that’s unusual, emotive / sensory, and specific? Write a rich paragraph of description at a key point in the discussion, as near the start as you can get it (this is where the space on the right-hand side comes in). Then look for other places in the dialogue where you can weave in further detail or references, jotting those in the right-hand column and using arrows to say where they go.

Either way

Find / imagine a point much further on in the story, where you want to remind the reader about important character / conversation / event. Drawing on your original scene, pick two or three of the most striking descriptive details to reference again, in a line of description.

Have fun!

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Want to explore more nifty techniques to keep the reader clear on everything in your story? Orientating the Reader will give you heaps of tips for handling flashbacks and multiple characters, plot threads, or time streams, so the reader stays thrilled, never confused. Click here to get it now.

What Is Narrative Tension?

We’re all told that a story needs “narrative tension”, a “central conflict”, and that’s true. The problem, though, is that in this context, “tension” and “conflict” don’t mean what they usually do – so when people apply that advice, it can end up ruining the story.

The most striking example I’ve ever found of this was a “castle” – I shan’t name it, to protect the innocently hapless. We’d chosen it for a mini-adventure visit mostly because it promised Talking Portraits. After the wonderful storytelling on HMS Victory, in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, we were all up for audio story tours!

The “portraits” were large vertical flat screens, with characters posed as paintings which then come alive and chat to you – basically videos that start moving when you enter the room. The characters were the castle’s owner, his wife, and their daughter, discussing the history of the castle. It started off fine, if a little dull… And then the characters started to argue. Mostly the couple berating their poor daughter, but sometimes they quarrelled with each other, too.

It fast became clear that someone had told the script writer that the story needed some tension, some conflict – and they’d gone for the garden-variety, not the narrative sort. Straight-up interpersonal tension and conflict.

The result? Cringing visitors were chased from room to room by this bickering family, flattening themselves on the furthermost walls to avoid setting the portraits off, warning each other on the sill of each room. Nobody wanted to witness the endless family quarrel, however many titbits of Useful History it included! Rather than giving the story energy, the tension and conflict ruined it, and we all scuttled away, dismayed.

I often see the same thing in early drafts, when people want to create narrative tension but end up with characters bickering. That makes us want to read it less, not more. It also often makes the main character less sympathetic – after all, they’re constantly sniping at people. That in turn makes us care less about their aims, which in turn makes us less interested in whether they do the thing or not. In short, it undermines the exact narrative tension which it’s trying to create.

That’s because narrative tension and conflict are not tension and conflict by our usual definition of the words: they’re much wider. In fact, I’ve stopped using the words “tension” and “conflict” in much of my teaching, and instead talk about narrative drive and interest. In the Story Elements course, we open it up to discussion of all the things it can mean, such as…

Casting a wide net of all the different kinds of narrative interest gives us a much richer repertoire to draw on, so we’re far less likely to fall into the bickering-characters trap.

It’s much more than those individual various drives, though: it’s the thread that draws the reader eagerly through the whole story. So the most helpful way to distil it, I find, is this: What does the reader hope / fear / think will happen next or want to find out?

That question is so useful that I’ve now added it to my template for my writing-group-instalments, so I always remember to ask them. And asking it sharpens my storytelling immeasurably. We always want the reader to be able to answer that question, 100% clearly: there is a definite reason they’re reading on. And if the reader can’t answer that question, we need to make the reason clearer – or, sometimes, invent it!

In each scene, in each chapter, in each act of the story, ask yourself, “What should the reader hope / fear / think will happen next or want to find out?” That’s your narrative tension, your narrative drive.

 

If you’d like to work on your narrative drive and plot interest in your stories, I have a brace of resources for you, now available as any-time Evergreen Resources: Narrative Drive and Plot Tension Map. 

With Narrative Drive, you’ll distil that all important question for a story, including the crucial component of backing the character through the story. With Plot Tension Map, you’ll pace and layer that across the whole story, so every part is equally gripping: no slow starts or soggy middles.

Both are self-paced videos that you can use any time, taking you through the process in an hour. You can use them to plan a story, troubleshoot it, or redraft it, whichever stage you’re at. Click here to get started with your Narrative Drive.