One to remember (2)

The time seems right to do something on what I call my ‘third rule of writing’ (see this post). My third rule was more a revelation, and the revelation was this: Fiction is memory.

One day it occurred to me. Fiction writing isn’t trying to be a simulation of life. It’s attempting to be a simulation of memory. This distinction is crucial.

Looking over my first attempts at fiction, I see it attempting to be the former: an imitation of real life. Details crowd in whether or not they are important. No-one can go anywhere without turning off the light, putting away his keys, scuffing his feet down the long grimy flight of stone steps. The story drowns in irrelevance.

Fiction is the ultimate case of false memory syndrome. Look at what our memories contain. No-one remembers a single ordinary day at work, but everyone remembers the day they got fired. But we may have in our memory a ‘typical day at work’, which is likely to be a fudge of lots of different days. Only when something extraordinary happens does your mind bother to write you an actual scene, complete with dialogue, vivid scenery, and the clammy warmth of the hotel bath towel you were wearing when you heard the shout, ‘Oh my god, Nick, two planes have just crashed into the World Trade Centre.’

In a way it’s blindingly obvious. A story should speak of remarkable things. But to say fiction is memory helps to clarify matters. Fiction and memory obey the same rules. They share the same topography. They have the same broad, hazy plains, the sharp peaks and deep valleys. Or, to be less precious about it, they have the stuff you notice and the stuff you are merely aware of. The stuff you really notice is what makes you smile, laugh, cry or rage, or the things that really hurt.

So now, if I’m planning to write a scene, what I often do is write down a bland summary of the basic events that will be happening here. Then I look at the character whom it’s happening to, and wonder what they would make of it all. And then I write the scene – writing it how I think this character would remember it.

Sometimes it works.

I’m sure that one of the things I found so compelling about Lee Weatherly’s book Kat Got Your Tongue (see below) was that it served as a supreme example of this ‘rule’ – fiction being memory. A girl without her lifetime of memories becomes literally a different character, and occupies her own distinct narrative separate from her old self. Reading it I began to ask the question: Is the person we think we are just a story we tell ourselves? Aren’t we all, in the end, merely storytellers?

One to remember

One of my favourite films is MEMENTO, in which the main character played by Guy Pearce suffers catastrophic amnesia and some pretty dramatic consequences. It’s a gripping thriller, even if it is utterly preposterous. A far more credible picture of amnesia emerges from Lee Weatherly’s young adult book KAT GOT YOUR TONGUE, and it’s just as riveting without having to resort to violence and skulduggery to make its points. The blurb on Amazon says it’s about ‘how amnesia can affect a family’, but thankfully this isn’t the case; memory loss of this kind is so rare that it couldn’t really serve as the basis of a teen novel. No, what this book does is use amnesia as a dazzlingly inventive way of painting an extraordinary character and her deeply moving story.

Here is the review I posted on Amazon UK:

Who are you if the person you were has disappeared? KAT GOT YOUR TONGUE is guaranteed to grip anyone who has ever looked in the mirror and wondered who exactly is staring back.

This tale begins with the main character being run over, and then gets more nail-biting. Although the heroine’s amnesia is what creates the mystery and drives the plot forward, the story is really about more universal things: friends and family, love and hate, discovery and loss and redemption. It’s also about the awful gulf of communication between parents and their kids, or between friends, and how neither seems able to understand the other, and how much better it could be if only we talked.

Don’t expect a typical teens-with-problems yarn. It’s effortlessly page-turning, yet you may have your brain tied in knots by some pretty deep questions. Even as the twin narratives race head-on towards each other, you are forced to ponder what ‘me’ really means. At the heart of this book lurks a maddening mystery: Is the person we think we are just a story we tell ourselves?

The narrator – who is really two narrators – is great company throughout, even when she’s at her most unpleasant. At times she’s more of an anti-hero, by no means a ‘nice person’ in the usual sense. The fact that she remains sympathetic even when she (in her own words) ‘totally loses it’ is part of what makes this book so special. Her bad behaviour is shown to come more from sadness and fear than from malice. Kathy and her alter-ego Kat pass the main character test with flying colours: you desperately hope she’s going to be all right.

Teenage girls will devour this book. Anyone who isn’t one (and I never was) should check it out too. It’s great fun, a perfect balance of darkness and humour, and a powerful tale about what it means to be the most extraordinary thing in the world: a person.