Memorial Day: Memory and Memoir: persistence and self

Dali communicated his perspective on the persistence of memory in this famous painting.  Memory is malleable, fleeting, and sometimes false.  If you are writing a memoir or just recounting a memory—and you’re devoted to telling the truth—what to do? 

You can start by reviewing journals, pictures, and mementos.  But at some point you have to sit quietly and think.  How did such and such come to happen?  You will realize that telling a story requires both more and fewer facts than you have in your own memory. 

Some sensational happenings just don’t fit the story you chose to tell.  To weave an understandable plot you may have to braid together strands of memory material from different eras.  That’s where the art of storytelling begins.  You must employ emotional detail to engage the reader or listener.  If you can’t draw the audience into the story, you won’t have an audience for long.

A lot has been said about the reduction in attention span these days, due in part to the competition for our attention by cell phones, for instance.  It is harder to engage and hold attention now, so your story must make every word count.  On the bright side, it seems to be a hard-wired human trait to seek stories.  It is how we make memories persist.