Everyday Canvas

Memories and Writing

Prompt: “We turn memories into stories, and if we don’t, we lose them. If the stories are gone, then the people are gone too,” says Amy Harmon in What the Wind Knows
To what degree do you use your memories in your writing? If you use them, do you think of preserving them or do you use them because they fit your story or poem?

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I don’t write to preserve my memories. If I wanted to do that, I’d write a memoir, which isn’t happening at any old time. I don’t have that kind of a courage.

On the other hand, the memories or rather the distortion of them jump up sometimes during the course of writing and they surprise me when I recognize them, especially when I give a fictional character a memory of an event that actually happened to me or one I witnessed. Also, some of the most surprising (and mostly forgotten) memories that bounce out of nowhere usually happen when I am writing poetry.

In addition, there are those events that make me think would work well in a piece of fiction. I jot those down, and if they are in the form of a letter or an object, then I keep them for future reference.