On Memories And Remembering Them

Some people have the gift of eidetic memory. Some people have the gift of remembering instinctively how to spell "eidetic." I proudly have the latter.

A Burden I Do Not Carry, Y'All
For those of you unfamiliar with the term, the phonetics of which make me think of ducks for some reason, "eidetic memory" refers to the ability to pretty much remember everything that happens to you ever. Which is very much one of those blessing/curse packages: on the one hand, you can solve murder mysteries or make a perfect eyewitness or be awesome at Quizzo, which is pretty sweet, but on the other hand, you may forever hear that taunting grade-school chant of "Fatty McFatFat Fattypants" or fall prey to a telekinetic serial killer out to steal your ability via some ambiguous process of brain-removal, which is bad.

Being a convenient blessing/curse package, incidentally, eidetic memory turns out to be highly useful for Instantly Complex Characterization (i.e., "it is a gift, but also a burden, y'all, so obviously I am not perfect, on the contrary, I am quirky and realistic"), which means, hey presto, drama.

Unfortunately/fortunately, I am not so blessed/cursed. I have a normal memory!

Okay okay okay so "normal" is a strong word. My memory is "not-cool-weird-the-way-eidetic-is-cool-weird-at-least."

Perhaps I should explain.

Reality TV, Or Perhaps More Aptly, TV Reality
I don't know if I am unusual in this sense, or if others share this tendency, although it seems bizarre to me: I tend to remember my memories - ah, memories, those rogue vignettes stored away in one's personal history archive that get triggered into Technicolor from time to time by the occasional stimuli of one's wandering senses - I tend to remember my memories as fuzzy silent television scenes.

They're full color scenes, mostly, but the majority are marked by silence. I end up having to provide my own soundtrack, which sometimes -- usually -- means narration. That narration is either aloud, whilst I describe said memory to other people with my own mouth, or subvocalized, as I add commentary to the scene in my head.

Not to mention, the actors in the scene are kind of like puppets that do what I "remember" them to do. They are very wooden and poorly trained.

For example, if I were to try to recall that time we took Clay's baby doll and made a really cool song about it that went something like Clay has a baby doll, Clay has a baby doll? Even though it wasn't in fact a baby doll but an innocent unisex plaything? Whose connotation was nevertheless warped by the cruel minds of youngsters proving the doctrine of Original Sin?

Hipster Brain Prefers Valencia Filter.

I can see it, a bit fuzzy and Instagram-filter-y on the edges, but there is no soundtrack and I couldn't tell you how the song went. And the children in this horrific tableau should not get compensation for their poor reenactment. I remember it precisely because I am putting it into words, which is tied to the vague images and a confidence that this event of juvenile malice did, indeed, happen.

I have not read many (alright, any) psychological documents on this subject, but I am curious to know if this stilted, voiceover-requiring replay is the widespread experience of Remembering. I'm sure you all remember things the same way! At least I will convince myself so, because, you know, there is such tangible comfort in doing the same thing as everyone else.

The Only Way In Which I Am Anything Sort Of Like Brad Pitt In Ocean's Eleven
There is another peculiar thing about my memory. Whenever the question "What's your earliest childhood memory?" comes up, I can only vividly remember ever things related to food.

I guess I have a subconscious eating fixation, because I do not eat that much in real life! Hahaha, no, that is false. I guess I have a conscious eating fixation.

Anyway, this is not to say that I do not remember anything else from my early youth. This is rather to say that the first and most clear memories are always eating-related.

I Genuinely Remember These Food-Related Things, You Guys
Nathan and I made "butter cookies" when I was legitimately two years old. I think this wins for earliest memory ever for me. "Butter cookies" is in quotes because really they were "Shedd's Spread Country Crock Churn Style, Country Fresh Taste Guaranteed! cookies" (I remember that title in its entirety because, years later, Nathan and I put that entire thing to the tune of 'Jingle Bell Rock,' and now I can never unremember it. See? Food memory), which is in quotes because they were only cookies insofar as round blobs of something on a baking pan constitute cookies. Ah, the age of innocence.

I ate a Lego piece. The kind with four studs, I think. Pretty sure that was the last time I was ever able to intentionally swallow something larger than a very small pill without an extensive mental pep rally and a tall glass of water.

I ate a gumball. As in, like, ate, as in, swallowed and allowed to journey down my esophagus, as in, what you're not supposed to do with gumballs. My mother was subsequently informed by some well-meaning friends that I ought to drink a tantalizing blend of table salt and water in order to loosen the evil esophageal glue. I sat in a bathtub and drank miserably from a green plastic cup with a frog on it.

I drank barium. Or something with barium in it, to get an X-Ray done. They either flavored it real good or I am just a strange kid, because I thought it was basically a banana milkshake so I of course asked them for more. At which point my mother and the lady nurse had a good healthy adult chuckle, and rightly so, at my hilarious naïveté.

Ask me about my childhood, and these are the stories that spring right to the forefront. Silent movies with narration, but the frames are bright and very detailed and varyingly delicious. I suppose I was a well-fed young thing, and for that I am grateful.

Once Again I Close With The Rhetorical Questions
So why all this talk of memory and food? Do I have some sort of unrealized yearning to remember differently? To remember different things? What spurred me to reflect on my memory engine and disclose these quasi-humiliating personal tales? Am I perhaps simply prone to pondering things that are on the deeper end of the pool of things people are prone to ponder? Should I have used "pond" instead of "pool" in that last question for humor? Why did I choose this topic, of all topics? How about all of the above?

I actually can't remember.

On The Right to Write Fiction

(*Notice: this kind of post frequency will probably not be kept up in future. While I plan to do at least one entry per week, I specifically wanted to churn out more reading content right off the bat. Holla!)

This issue is, to me, like bench pressing an SUV. I can't quite figure out how to handle it and it frequently crushes me.

The issue: how can I write believable, honest fiction (oxymoron, but, you know) without having gone through extensive life experience?

Another way to put this: on the road to creating quality, credible fiction, where is that metaphorical fork where (1) imaginative, researched extrapolation and (2) relying on actual, personal experience must diverge, where the latter is the sole correct path to take? More importantly, does it even exist?

Explaining That Last Example, Since It Probably Only Made Things More Confusing
We must begin with the idea that fiction hasn't actually happened. Otherwise, hello! Nonfiction. All fiction writers are making stuff up (duh) which means it has to be okay by rules of fiction-writing to make stuff up (duh).

Right. Let's pretend I really want to write a story about, oh, like, High School Romance, which is a one hundred percent hypothetical situation of course. I have no personal experience with said situation. Please do not feel sorry for me though because it is totally okay and I've made peace with the whole thing.

Research.

Anyway, so I do my research. I hang out with, or otherwise gather information through a number of varyingly-appropriate means vis-à-vis some real-life kids who had or have a crazy soap-operatic high school romantic life. I read stories about high school romance. I watch movies (say A Walk To Remember, which is, like, THE GOLD STANDARD, right??) and TV episodes about high school romance, and so on and so forth.

Are these resources all I need to be able to write convincingly? Honestly? Poignantly enough to be worth a read? To offer something new or at least sufficiently wonder-inducing?

Or are my efforts, artificial by nature, doomed to become a cheap patchwork pastiche of all those prior second-hand experiences, filtered through my own inexperienced mind?

Or do I actually have more of a personal connection to the scenario than initially meets the eye? I was, after all, young once. Shouldn't I be able to faithfully call to mind the deeper motivations and feelings that tend to drive Youthful Affection, regardless of its unrealized status (again, I'm okay with this) in my own life?

Am I credible? Or am I innately incredible, and not in the way that means "awesome"?

The Fantasy Caveat
In discussion of "credibility," we are naturally ruling out the more highly imaginative aspects of Clear and Obvious Fantasy. Clear and Obvious Fantasy, however, gives us a good place to camp out and explore what we generally expect from fiction. So we're going to pitch our tent, build our camp-fire, and cease and desist with this atrociously corny metaphor right now, okay, moving on.

For starters. You and I know nobody has ever lived in a magical land ruled by a half-elf king who rides literal fire-breathing unicorns, right? A good fantasy writer should be someone able to not only create a half-elf king, but also convince us whether we would or wouldn't love him if we lived in that magical land of fire-breathing-unicorn-riding. The question becomes: does said writer have the necessary tools to conjure such a king? And does this half-elf king reveal anything to us (about half-elves, about humans, about ourselves, about the universe) worth revelation?

We give the "credible" stamp, then, to authors who manage to convince us that their story (1) remains viable in its world and (2) contains tangible value for ours. Consequently, said credible author would need details sufficient to convince us of the plausibility of this world and, to a certain extent, the realistic activity of its inhabitants. The plausible-details part is a product of research, but realistic activity of character requires something more: a marriage of empathy and experience.

Research, empathy, experience. I think I'm finally getting somewhere with this.

My Working Hypothesis: A Case Study
Okay, take drugs. Okay, that didn't come out right. Okay, I did that on purpose. But you know what I mean.

It does no justice to reader or author or drug addicts to portray a story involving drugs inaccurately and carelessly. It adds no value to you or me or them.

However! I suggest that not having personally experienced the fight doesn't rule out my ability to include, say, an ex-drug addict as a main character in my work.

To conjure a convincing world, I can take time and expend energy to depict an accurate setting of time and space. Read long articles. Get to know people with long roads and long stories behind them. Do plenty of research and then some. Etc.

Following, experience and empathy step in to fill in the how-people-work part of things. I can take what I know of myself and how I work and think and put myself in a situation. Then one of two things happens: either I use my own response, or I flip the whole thing and figure out how I would respond given different parameters. I take what this person or character dreams about or wants from life and substitute it for my own, and explore how that feels. Or vice versa.

Doing this requires a level of personal experience, to be sure. Not necessarily the specific experience of Being A Drug Addict so much as bigger, more general experiences, the kind that grip and grind and grow you and how you process emotion. Things, I guess, like falling in love, or having a kid, or losing a loved one, or finishing a degree. Things like getting into college. Winning a contest. Losing a debate. Traveling the world. Seeing social injustice first-hand. Battling and conquering a different addiction.

The list of things goes on, so many of which I haven't done, but maybe more importantly, so many which I have.

So I Think I Can Write, I Think
I don't have it down to a science. Show me someone who has and I'll show you a half-elf king who rides on well you get the point.

Sure, having but one-and-twenty winters behind me (and not an altogether adventurous set at that), my fiction is sort of necessarily crippled on the 'experience' side of things. I'll wager, though, that thinking through this whole thing means I'm somewhere on the way to getting this right, to writing stories that aren't true but matter truthfully. To approaching fiction with a healthy respect for what it, and for that matter I, can and can't do. And in the process, getting better at it.

We'll call it one rep with the SUV. And one more corny metaphor for the discard pile.