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Experience and Memory: a Problematic Relationship

May 2, 2022

creativity, experiencing, imagination, memory, reality, writing

It’s impossible to experience without memory. Think about it: If you had no memory beyond the immediate, ever-ghostly “now”, how could you remember how a sunset looked like? How could you remember your first kiss, or some important achievement?

Moreover, it’s not only experiencing that, without memory, would suffer. Learning would be difficult if not impossible. Much of what constitutes our humanity would be absent.

And yet, there’s something problematic about the coexistence of experience and memory. I’m of course referring to the fact that memory taints the experience it’s supposed to help us remember.

We often think we remember things very well, very accurately, maintaining an objective view to their real essence. As the perceptive, thinking reader that you are, I’m sure you’ve discovered many problems in the sentence above.

The truth is, we don’t remember things all that well, not very accurately, and it’s quite by definition that we can’t hold an objective view, let alone to the “real essence” of things – good luck defining that, especially for emotions, thoughts, and states of mind.

As I’ve said before, memory is crucial for writing – either fiction or nonfiction. So, how do we go about resolving the paradoxical coexistence between experience and memory?

experience memory — This image from the 80s helps me remember some scenes of my early childhood. But the memories are a **poor** guide for creating a factual foundation. Still, it helps me (re)create a non-fact based reality which is still useful

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Every Book Is Autobiographical – or Should Be

January 3, 2022

Experiencing, Writing

creativity, experiencing, imagination, literature, memory, writing

(Auto)biographies, autobiographical novels, “based on a true story”… There seem to be many ways of more or less describing the same thing. At least that’s what one may think. However, in actual fact, all these are very different modes of writing, with unique requirements. More importantly, for the purposes of this post, most people seem to ignore a very crucial thing: Every book is autobiographical!

This might feel an obviously wrong thing to say. “Hang on, Chris”, you might think. “How on earth can every book be autobiographical? What about American Psycho, or even some science fiction – say, Solaris? Surely, you’re not claiming that Bret Easton Ellis has killed people or that Stanisław Lem traveled to another planet?”

The answer is – to the best of my knowledge – no. Yet both these two examples, just like every other book ever written by any human is deep down an autobiographical book. The reason?

Because every author, even when writing fiction, puts a piece of themselves in it.

Or at least, they ought to! Because about the only way to fail entirely at writing fiction is to not allow yourself – your subjectivity, your experiences, your flaws and vices and insecurities – to become part of the narrative. Writing an autobiographical book the way I just defined it is the easiest way for any author (and especially so for less experienced ones) to introduce affect in their narratives.

Let’s see why that happens and how to control it.

autobiographical book — When it comes to all books being autobiographical, it’s not out experiences that are important, but *remembering* and *reflecting on* our experiences

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Tell Me, Mariner – a Collection of Transcendent Short Stories

October 4, 2021

Fiction

creativity, imagination, literary fiction, literature, short story

Tell Me, Mariner is a collection of short stories I’ve recently put together. More still, it’s a collection of what I refer to as transcendent short stories. If you remember “1992”, that I recently published here, it’s part of this very collection.

This collection features The Mariner, a character who is very special in my work, for reasons that become clearer to readers of this volume. In a nutshell, The Mariner is a character that is, quite literally, central in many of my novels. He’s not a main character in any of them, and he’s not even literally present in all of them – though he is figuratively present. Recall what we’ve said about style and authorial trademarks.

If all this sounds abstract, remember that this is a collection of transcendent short stories. Part metaphorical, part magical-realism, part Kafkaesque.

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