Why Can't They Remember?!

It’s one of the most maddening 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 bothering to read 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, underling 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. 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.

Frustrating as it may be to encounter the problem, fixing it 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 thank them – 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 from the start, which embeds them even deeper in the story and opens up richer story possibilities. And then, when you’re asking the group 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…”

Writing Skill: The Pretence

In the run-up to the Story Elements course, I'm posting a trio of Writing Skills, one a week, to get you exploring the different ingredients that go into story creation: premise • characters • place • time • plot layering • tension & stakes • plot point of view • beginnings • themes & symbols • subplots • detail & dialogue • endings.

This week's Writing Skill is THE PRETENCE, to play with the first four topics of the course: premise, characters, place, and time. You have two characters, each of whom is pretending to be something they're not. They might be pretending they have a different job, status, class, nationality... whatever you fancy. I suggest you choose a different type of thing for each character. And both characters are trying to impress the other. For example, the CEO of a big finance company is pretending to be the janitor, to seem more practical and down to earth, and the new hire is pretending to be French, for reasons I haven't quite yet worked out, but which might emerge in the writing. NB: The reader already knows the truth about both characters, so we know they're lying, and we're giggling away and half eating our hands with the tension.

To start, spend a couple of minutes deciding what each is lying about, being reasonably specific. For example, if they're lying about their job, what's their actual job? What are they pretending is their job?

In choosing their lies, you'll also be generating the setting for the scene (the place and time). For example, with my CEO of a big finance company, I've immediately got a setting of the City of London, a towering glass building, a corporate environment, and I can keep that present day or jump back a bit in time. How about 2009, when bankers were deeply unpopular? That would give my CEO added motivation to hide their real identity!

You don't have to stick to your own lived timeline either: one of the characters could be a pyramid builder, lying about being the pharoah, or indeed the pharoah, lying about being a pyramid builder.

Once you've got your two characters through their lies, and the setting, spend the rest of the time (about 8 mins if you're doing a ten-minuter) writing their interaction. You can stick to dialogue mostly, throwing in action/description where it's relevant, as this is very much first-draft stuff. And play it for laughs!

Why this skill?

This Skill gives you a swift, nifty way in to the first four elements of stories: premise, characters, place, and time. I've given you the premise: two characters lying to each other. That's enough to start you off writing, and how you develop it is what will make it unique. Your characters are created through their lies: an unusual start to character development, but a fun one to loosen up your powers of invention, and it instantly creates character complexity. And those lies in turn give you your setting, your place and time, which immediately makes it easier to start writing and suggests new avenues of story and character possibility – such as my CEO's lie being in the context of the global economic crisis.

These four are the first four elements we explore in the Story Elements course: live online classes OR in person in Oxford, your choice. Read more about the course and heaps of reviews, and book your place here.

Writing prompt: quick-fire research on... 1970s

Create a richer sense of time in your writing with quick-fire research and writing prompts. This is the first of a bundle, so have fun. HOW TO PLAY: Don't scroll down yet! Set aside 20-30 mins.

Creating a sense of the time

"The Pooles, too, were very deliberately leaving the provinces, making themselves metropolitan. They had left almost everything behind - the three-piece suite, the Wilton carpets, the glass-fronted bookcases, the family silver. Elinor Poole said to Alexander that the exciting thing was that the flat was flat, the rooms, all in a row, just rooms. You could sleep or eat or work in any or all of them. They furnished it with fitted cord carpets in silver and greys, with white paint, geometrically patterned curtains. Carpenters fitted streamlined shelves and cupboards. The children had bright Finnish blankets, scarlet, blue, yellow. They put up a Ben Nicholson print, a Matisse poster ... Elinor grew her yoghurt in a white bowl with a beaded muslin cover: these where days when the English had not in general seen any yoghurt, let alone taken to having it delivered in sterile painted plastic pots." Still Life, AS Byatt

One of my favourite aspects of AS Byatt's quartet is her close attention to its period. Writing just a few decades after the time it's set, she is as meticulous about its period detail as if she were writing a historical novel. 

The pleasure of a strong sense of time is partly in the rich texture it creates. A sense of time permeates everything and every detail can evoke the period. What food do they eat? (Remember those ubiquitous parsley garnishes of the 1980s? The sudden profusion of rocket and balamic in the 90s? Can you remember what year you learnt to pronounce "quinoa"?) What colours predominate? (Remember the duck-egg blue and soft brown everywhere in the late noughties?) What do they clean themselves and their houses with, what products do they buy? (Anyone remember the harsh green fairy soap?) What were their names? What about their slang, their jobs, their homes, their furniture, their music? What was completely new and what did they want to leave behind in the past? 

But the sense of time goes beyond the textural, sensory world of objects, lovely as that is to revel in. It's ingrained in their views, their assumptions, their expectations. It's not just the texture of the story: it's the shape of it. In the Story Elements course, we explore how giving a premise a strong sense of time, and reshaping it to its era, can turn even a flimsy idea into a powerful story. 

A premise about a nurse who heals by non-medical means and gets engaged: so far, a bit nondescript. But what if it's a Victorian suffragette's battle to keep her job after marriage and insistence that "old wives' remedies" do work? Or a 1960s nurse's secret introduction of psychotherapy and talking cures into a hospital for traumatised Vietnam vets? Or a sangoma in the Boer War?

That's also why, when we're doing research in class, I get my students to do their initial research before I give them the story idea. It seems counter-intuitive, but it works better: they explore the time more open-mindedly, without zeroing in on the exact details around the story. The time comes first, with its own priorities and issues, and then the story gets nested within that.

No story is without a sense of time. Even if you think it's simply set "now", our now is already so vividly distinct from even our recent past, so ingrained with textures, opinions, possibilities, and constraints. Its distinctive nowness is a constant source of vibrant narrative detail. Everything that makes the world come vividly alive, for the reader.

Douglas Admas famously came up with this theory on technology: 

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
(from The Salmon of Doubt)

The same is true of how we see our own time, if we don't stop to think about it. But what if we do stop, if we do think about it, if we tunnel back through our memories just five or ten years? We start to notice the sharp differences from the past that help us observe the sharp distinctness of the now. For stories set in the past, the creative effort and discoveries come from research. For stories set now, that creative work is the art of noticing – through comparing with the past. And that in turn informs the stories we write into the future.

If you'd like to learn more about all the elements of storytelling, and enrich your storytelling in a dozen different ways, the Story Elements course explores the 12 key elements of stories through hands-on activities and real writing processes, in lively workshop-style classes. 

Writing prompt: quick-fire research on... Vikings

Create a richer sense of time in your writing with quick-fire research and writing prompts. This is the first of a bundle, so have fun. HOW TO PLAY: Don't scroll down yet! Set aside 10-15 mins. (If you're reading this at work, book 15 mins of your lunch break to scribble.)