Memories Versus Stories

Yesterday, I wasn’t feeling too good, and I couldn’t sleep, so I picked up a book that my friend highly recommended. It’s about 300 pages. I started it in the evening. By 2am, I had finished it.

The book I’m talking about is called ‘Maus’ by Art Spiegelman. It’s one of the most famous graphic novels of all time, and it’s won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, which is basically the highest accolade you can get worldwide for storytelling.

The book is primarily nonfiction, but it is also a story within a story, where Art is recounting meeting with his dad, Vladek, over the course of a few years, asking him about Vladek’s time in Nazi-occupied Poland and then the subsequent time he spent in the Auschwitz concentration camps during the Second world war. Art made the entire book himself - every single cell in every single page is drawn and penciled by Art. It’s the most personal story a ‘person’ can tell. What makes the book especially brilliant is that Art uses the metaphor of showing different cultures/religions/people as different animals - where the Jews are mice and the Nazis/Germans are cats.

Now, I’m not going to get into the subject matter, or even the actual story. The reason I am starting this guide with telling about Maus is because of a thing Art says around mid-way through the book - in which he is technically quoting Samuel Beckett.

This is during an exchange Art is having with his therapist while he’s having a - let’s call it a writer’s block to oversimplify it -

Art: Samuel Beckett once said: “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”

Pavel: Yes.

Both men are quiet for a few seconds (technically, one frame of the comic).

Art: On the other hand, he SAID it.

Pavel: He was right. Maybe you can include it in your book.

See, Maus isn’t just a story about Art’s father’s experience, it’s a story about Art’s experience writing the book. It’s fully meta. So when Art is talking to his therapist about probably not wanting to write more of the book he’s writing - a book that I’m already reading so he clearly finished it - he’s struggling with one giant question that every storyteller asks themselves: Why?

Why do we replace silence and nothingness with ‘sound’ and ‘something’? Why do we make stories? Why do we write? Why do we care about re-constructing the past? Why do we struggle with understanding it? Why do we re-contextualize it?

Why do we choose to relive life?

That’s what I want to talk about today. Because just like Art, I want some answers too. And even if you haven’t asked yourself any of the above questions so far, you will someday. Because just like Art, and just like me, you’re a storyteller too. Perhaps you and I don’t have Pulitzer Prizes yet, but there’s still time.

I’m going to break down the rest of this guide into three sections: the first one will talk about memories, the second will be about catharsis, and the final one will be about happiness.

A Powerful Memory

I’m going to reuse one of my all-time favorite quotes here. It’s from Doctor Who and written by Steven Moffat -

‘Stories are where memories go when they’re forgotten.’

Sometimes, a certain experience from our past, no matter how recent or far away it may be, stands out from the rest of our life. It can be a good experience, or a bad one. But if it stands out when you think about your past, then it means that it is a powerful memory.

Think about your childhood. What’s the first memory that pops into your head? Do you remember the first time you cried? That time you were bullied in school? Or your birthday? That day you spent with your grandparents?

Your memories are stories, your brain is the storykeeper. You can find some, like the ones that you thought of when I asked the above questions. But if I were to ask you what happened on July 23 of 2012, you probably won’t remember. Unless you write a daily diary and you can look it up. But the point is, you won’t remember it unless you looked it up in your ‘storykeeper’ (not trying to sell some Launchora products here, just organically showing you why we named it this way).

Remembering something that happened to you is not a unique act. Everyone does it. But when you use a memory to understand yourself in the present, you turn it into a story.

Because the true (subjective) difference between a memory and it’s story is context. The past itself doesn’t have a meaning. But when you think about it in the present, you give it context. Which basically means, you give yourself a reason for thinking about it.

Every time you think back to a memory, you get to it either by choice or by a trigger.

When it’s a choice, you already have at least some sliver of a reason. An example of choice would be thinking about your last birthday. Why? Well, the reason could be that you wanted to see how you’ve changed compared to one year ago you.

When a memory is remembered due to a trigger, you don’t find out the reason until after you’ve gone through the memory. An example of this would be that time you unintentionally passed by your childhood home or your old school, and it sparks off a bunch of memories. Why? Because those memories had a part to play in making you, who you are today.

When we write stories about ourselves, or even when we write fiction, we’re drawing at least some part of it from our own experiences and memories.

Powerful memories are story-makers.

But the question still remains, why do we do this?

The Catharsis Of Stories

Catharsis is the process by which we understand and then let go of repressed feelings and emotions. It doesn’t always have to be a happy feeling in the moment, but it is eventually supposed to be better for us.

When we explore our past - an incident that happened or how we felt back then, we are allowing ourselves to judge our past self so we can understand why we did what we did or why something happened to us.

Like I said earlier, the resulting catharsis doesn’t always have to be a good feeling. But consider this - if you did something two years ago that you thought was okay back then, but now you know that it wasn't okay or you were not nice or considerate enough - this is something you can reflect on with your story and in turn grow as a person.

Imagine this - if you woke up today, with no memory of yesterday, and this kept happening day after day, do you think you would grow as a person? Yes, sure, technically, you’ll grow physically. But how can we make better choices today, if we are unable to learn from the mistakes of yesterday?

Whether you’re the one who did something wrong in the past, or if someone wronged you in the past, writing about it is how you can ‘get over it’. Because if you don’t, you’ll be stuck under it.

So now that we’ve gone through how powerful memories can be, and how reliving the past can be cathartic, let’s talk about the final stage of all actions we take as human beings.

Finding Happiness

Ask anyone what they want from their life or career or relationships, and eventually they’ll use the word ‘happy’ or ‘happiness’.

We all want happiness. That isn’t the debate here. But what does storytelling - especially one where we are exploring our past through memories - have to do with happiness?

In Maus, when Art wrote about his father, a person he found very hard to have a ‘happy’ relationship with, he felt better. The experience of telling his father’s story and listening to him, was cathartic for Art. If it wasn’t for this experience, he wouldn’t have been able to understand his father or how he feels about him.

The act of storytelling may not have made Art 100% happy, but doing so did improve his happiness. Meaning, if he didn’t write Maus, something that took him about 13 years, he would have been less happy.

Basically, by reliving his past, he was able to get better at living his present, which eventually would lead to be a better, happier future.

Of course what I just said is my perspective. I don’t know Art personally. But everything I’ve said here today is my perspective.

I’ll give you a personal example. I’ve written a couple fictional stories that were drawn from my personal experiences. I won’t tell you which ones because there’s no fun in that - for me the whole point of writing fiction is to lie about how truthful the stories are.

Anyway, these stories I wrote were about things that happened to me in the past, things that I did, and the people I met along the way. By writing about my past, I was not only looking to understand what happened, but how it changed me. And then something even more interesting happened. Once I understood the ‘why’, I was able to become better at being me, because past me was teaching the present me a lesson.

We don’t know the significance of the thing we’re doing in the present until it becomes the past. Reliving our past, our memories - our life - can help us become better at doing something - at being ourselves - in the present.

I’d like to go back to the ‘Doctor Who’ quote I referred earlier. The one that says that ‘Stories are where memories go when they’re forgotten’. I’m no one to challenge Steven Moffat - who is pretty much one of my all-time favorite writers - but I would like to give you a modified version of the quote to help with the context of this guide.

Stories are where memories go when they’re understood.

We don’t have to tell stories. We don’t have to understand our past. We don’t have tostain silence and nothingness with words.

But sometimes, doing even one of the above things can make us feel better.

No matter what your goal in life is, you will undoubtedly be better at achieving it if you feel good about yourself.

So, the next time you sit down to write, remember this - good things can come out of bad memories. As for good memories, well they are the stories we need to remind ourselves of, that good things can and will happen.

Start writing now. The button is below.