The Writing Practice and Memory

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With a series of writing assignments in the works, it sometimes feels counterproductive to continue my daily writing practice in the face of deadlines, interviewing and drafting.

But is it?

This practice has nothing to do with any work. It has more to do with “priming the pump” and letting my mind run free for at least 30 minutes per day.

I’m doing that now.

Sometimes I feel like there should be an agenda, even with this practice. But there really shouldn’t be.

Sure – once I get going, I should stay on whatever topic that presents itself.

Today, it’s about the writing practice versus the projects at hand.

It’s the discipline, the making time to do this.

It’s the idea that I can write about anything I bloody well please for a set amount of time every day. Some of this might see the light of day in a blog post or an eventual story for publication, but much of the time it’s shit.

And that’s OK.

The value is in the doing. I might get a spark of nostalgia and write about my early life in Miami or coming of age in Hollywood. Like everybody else, there’s a rich trove of memories to plumb. The trick is to try to be as accurate as possible, but we all know that memory is a funny thing.

In “Saving Francesca,” author Melina Marchetta puts it this way:

“Memory is a funny thing. It tricks you into believing that you’ve forgotten important moments, and then when you’re raking your brain for a bit of information that might make sense of something else, it taps you on the head and says, “Remember when you told me to put that memory in the green rubbish bin? Well, I didn’t, I put it in the black recycling tub, and it’s coming your way again.”

I love that. Does that resonate with anybody else?

I have also heard or read that our memories are never completely accurate. We’ve put some sort of fictional spin on them over the years.

In a blog post for The Independent, writer Nilima Marshall said our memories are unreliable because of our tendency to construct complete storylines:

“Experiments by researchers at the University of Sussex suggest people often misremember how certain events end, sometimes even creating memories of incidents that never happened.”

Maybe so, but I want to try to get everything down while I still can. Perhaps friends and family members can call me out if something doesn’t seem right. But I will keep going.

Flawed memories or not. It’s all fodder – grist for the mill.

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• Discipline
• Melina Marchetta
• Memories
• Nilima Marshall
• Saving Francesca
• The Independent
• Wrting