Writing Boost #2

In which we remember to remember

Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash

And here we are at week two of the writing boost series. The other morning as I recorded something in my journal I wrote, writing about it helps me to remember. And I started thinking about how so much of writing is about remembering. It’s about remembering the smell of roses on a hot June day in your childhood garden, the first time you tasted really hot sauce on an enchilada on vacation in Mexico, that time you heard a boom that meant something terrible had just happened.

Remembering is not just important for memoir writers, though today’s prompts are useful for memoirists. They are also helpful for fiction writers. Because remembering is what our lives are made of, whether we are remembering our long-ago childhoods or an event that happened yesterday. Remembering is one way of knowing yourself, and knowing yourself is key to writing. When you understand yourself it’s a short leap to understanding humanity. And when you understand humanity you can write characters who leap off the page and into readers’ hearts and minds—whether those characters are real or fictional.

Those characters that leap off the page do so because of the internal arc that the author has traced. Yes, external events such as bankruptcy, war, infidelity, death, divorce, and so on are important because they drive the plot. But it is what’s going on inside the character’s head that keeps readers reading. And the internal arc of a character can be made even more compelling if it echoes something you yourself have experienced.

It doesn’t have to be the exact same thing, it just has to be resonant with it. Here’s an example from my own life. Many years ago, when my children were still young, we had a house fire. We were all home one night when I smelled fire and then heard our smoke detector go off. We grabbed our animals and fled. Half our house burned that night. I still remember the shock of displacement, the feeling of going to the grocery store and looking at “normal” people and marveling that they were living normal lives while mine had just blown apart.

I’ve never used this specific event in any of my novels and I probably never will. But I can draw on those feelings to write the emotions of the protagonist of my current WIP. She’s been catapulted from her city environment to a small town in the country. Because I’ve experienced that feeling of being hurled into a different situation, my writing about it gives it more depth.

And of course—you do not have to have experienced something to write about it. Not at all. The trick is to use the things you have done and felt and seen and heard to lend credence to the lives of your fictional characters.

The Boost

This week we’re going to be writing about remembering. Two elements here, and you can pick either one or both. If you choose both, I recommend you commit the same amount of time to each, i.e., fifteen or twenty minutes. Here are your prompts:

Something I want to remember is…..

Something I don’t want to remember is….

I’ll wager a bet that the second one brings up some juicy material for your writing! And remember, this can be you writing as you or you writing as one of your characters.

If you come up with any bits you’d like to share, drop them in the comments.

More

Susan Defrietas does a great job of writing about a character’s internal arc.

David Corbett is a beast when it comes to character. This video of his is up on YouTube and covers similar ground to what I’ve written above. I’m also a fan of his books on character, The Art of Character, and The Compass of Character.

A lovely post about writing memories

You can find Weekly Writing Boost #1 here.

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