What To Write When You Can't Remember
...without feeling it's going to land you in a whole load of trouble
Last week, the day after The Salt Path scandal was made public in The Observer, I met with a writer that I’m currently mentoring. She is writing her memoir and she was struggling with one area in particular, the bits that she couldn’t remember.
She told me that it worried her, more so after reading about The Salt Path and the alleged dishonesties in that book. ‘Now I’m worried about not remembering accurately and being accused of writing something that is not honest.’
I have heard this from a lot of people this week, whatever your views on The Salt Path, it has left a lot of writers unnerved as these types of crises always do, which makes me feel sad.
I have some advice for you with regards to what to write when you can’t remember — eight different ways to get around that in fact. But before we get into that, I wanted to share something with you about how important honesty is to your work.
That same morning, the day after the scandal was revealed and before I’d had my chat with my mentee, I had looked at the Amazon reviews of The Salt Path, a book I must admit I hadn’t got round to reading. It surprised me just how many people were saying in those reviews, before they’d read The Observer’s claims, that the book might not be entirely accurate, how they just weren’t buying the story, how they just didn’t warm to the narrator, and how some things just weren’t adding up.
Other readers were of course oblivious, they enjoyed it for the story alone, but some noticed something between the lines because, in my opinion, if you are not honest with your reader, it shows, not obviously, but just as a little, nagging feeling that, over the course of a book, can feel off-putting and stops your reader connecting with the narrative in the way you want them too. Yes this dishonesty can be out and out lies, but it can also be the writer not being completely honest with themselves about their subject matter or how they were really feeling about certain events however they want to remember it with hindsight.
What human readers will always have over AI is intuition, unless we allow social media to dumb down our senses altogether, is our ability to sniff out something that doesn’t ring completely true, we were designed to make split second judgements, risk assessments, to keep ourselves safe from harm – intuition matters. This is why I don’t think we’ll ever really be wanting to read books written by AI because they won’t be written with heart and in that way they won’t be believable.
In my ghosting career, I would always meet with my subjects for chemistry meetings before we started working together. These are as important for the ghostwriter as they are for the ‘author’ because ghosting someone is a very intimate relationship, a ghost will probe the details of what they’re being told, they will make sure everything adds up. Yes, we’d meet to check the story out but I also always needed to like my subject because if I didn’t, I believe it shows on the page. It sounds strange but you can tell by the way someone writes how they feel about their subject, in the same way that if you are not honest you can somehow feel it in the words, it’s that little thing you just can’t put your finger on.
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And the one thing that I hear time and again about why you are here is because you appreciate my honesty, my openness, this can sometimes be more important than what we have to say, or the subjects we’re writing on. This is how we build trust and enduring relationships with our readers. And so if you’re playing a part, whether that’s writing something marketed as non-fiction which might possibly turn out to be fiction, or you’re writing about your life but staying superficial, surface-level, not going in too deep or too close to the bone, your reader isn’t going to connect to it emotionally, and they’re going to feel that something is just a bit… well, off.
But also just because we can’t remember everything that happened in our lives verbatim doesn’t mean we can’t write it in a memoir. Nor does it mean that if we do, and perhaps miss out details, we need to be worried about being accused of making it up and having our books pulped. There is a way around this that will not only maintain your relationship with your reader, but deepen it, let me explain by showing you eight different ways to write when you can’t remember...