Building Reader Intimacy with Memories
and how to create a strong memory core
We watched “Up” today with the kids. While everyone is generally familiar with the cinematic masterpiece of wordless storytelling that shows the progression of Carl & Ellie’s life, another scene stuck out to me (ignore TikTok’s butchering of the aspect ratio and the unceremonious cut to the end of the film):
For those who cannot watch the video, Russell describes how he looks up to his father, how he used to be involved in his life. How they used to sit on the curb outside an ice cream parlor after Russell’s Wilderness Explorer meetings, eat ice cream, and count cars that went by. Russell tells the viewer: “I liked that curb. It might sound boring, but it’s the boring stuff that I remember the most.”
Two important things happen in this scene that draws the reader in:
Russell uses prejudiced language to describe his experience (“I liked that curb”)
Russell is specific in his description of the past.
Those two elements — specificity and prejudice — are the keys to building an effective character memory.
Specificity is self explanatory: the memory must reference the granular sensory details of the experience.
Prejudice means that the character either makes an “I loved/liked/hated” statement, describes an experience as positive or negative, or the memory’s positivity/negativity is self-evident to the reader given the character’s reaction or subject matter.
Try and hold these terms in your mind throughout this article and see if you can find them in the other examples provided. Specificity and prejudice.
And this scene references another scene: earlier in the film where Russell talks about his dad, implying to the viewer that his father is absent, has potentially remarried or has an overprotective secretary, and is so totally wrapped up in his career that he’s unwilling or unable to be there for his son:
Both of these scenes shift Russell from a big-hearted, semi-annoying-but-good-natured-kid to a character with a real past — perhaps too much past — and real trauma that informs how he acts in the films. He’s fiercely loyal. He will not abandon “Kevin,” the rare bird, or “Dug” the lovable, bumbling retriever. His anger at Carl in the film’s climax is a direct result of his past: Russell thought Carl was different, but by choosing his own priorities over the people he’s supposed to protect, Carl proved to Russell that he’s no different from his father, from Phyllis, and every other adult he’s encountered in his very brief life who has let him down.
In short: these scenes make both Carl and the audience care about Russell. They build “buy in,” they, in the infamous words of Blake Snyder, “Save the Cat.”
But allowing the character to reveal themselves to the audience through their memories isn’t some cheap Hollywood trick. Authors have been doing it for years because telling stories about ourselves to the people we care about is how we build intimacy with others.
In the early stages of our own romantic relationships we hunger to learn about our beloved’s past. Their childhood. What makes them tick. What makes them who they are; who we are falling in love with.
So, how do we go about doing this in our own stories?
I’ve often said that even the best Gen-AI writing looks like it’s been written by a new writer — not someone new to the publishing scene, but new to the act of writing itself.
For the new writer, story exists in the present. In the here and now — even if the book is being told in past tense. The characters are often self-contained, only revealing information relevant to the plot or the situation they find themselves in this very instant. But that’s not at all how we, humans, move through the world. In Lisa Cron’s “Wired for Story” Tedx talk, she explains the neuroscience of how story was integral to our evolution as a species:
Like Lisa says in the video: we don’t go through the world simply reacting to stimuli. We contextualize our experiences by what’s happened to us before. We make value judgements about situations and other humans. We (hopefully) learn from our mistakes. Our past informs our present and shapes our future based on our relative positive or negative reactions to each stimulus.
When we incorporate our character’s learned history into our work, we deepen them and make them real, potentially elevating a character who is defined by their archetype to a new and fresh voice in the genre. Tolstoy gives us a fantastic example of this in his novella The Death of Ivan Ilych:
“All his life the example of a syllogism he had studied in Kiesewetter's logic - "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal" - had seemed to him to be true only in relation to Caius the man, man in general, and it was quite justified, but he wasn't Caius and he wasn't man in general, and he had always been something quite, quite special apart from all other beings; he was Vanya, with Mama, with Papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with his toys and the coachman, with Nyanya, then with Katenka, with all the joys, sorrows, passions of childhood, boyhood, youth. Did Caius know the smell of the striped leather ball Vanya loved so much? Did Caius kiss his mother's hand like he did and did the silken folds of Caius's mother's dress rustle like that for him? Was Caius in love like him? Could Caius chair a session like him? And Caius is indeed mortal and it's right that he should die, but for me, Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my feelings and thoughts - for me it's quite different. And it cannot be that I should die. It would be too horrible.”
—Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych
Here we see Ivan grappling with his very sudden mortality and the idea that, one day, Ivan will “end.” Notice that Ivan doesn’t focus on the here and now, but the pieces of his past that make him who he feels he is. His childhood. His talents. His mother. Ivan is not the being standing in front of the reader, much like the sum of you or me isn’t contained in a singular moment. Our personalities — our identities — are formed and informed by our past.
I hate visiting here. I hate that my wife of forty-two years is dead, that one minute one Saturday morning she was in the kitchen, mixing a bowl of waffle batter and talking to me about the dustup at the library board meeting the night before, and the next minute she was on the floor, twitching as the stroke tore through her brain. I hate that her last words were “Where the hell did I put the vanilla.”
I hate that I’ve become one of those old men who visits a cemetery to be with his dead wife. When I was (much) younger I used to ask Kathy what the point would be. A pile of rotting meat and bones that used to be a person isn’t a person anymore; it’s just a pile of rotting meat and bones. The person is gone—off to heaven or hell or wherever or nowhere. You might as well visit a side of beef. When you get older you realize this is still the case. You just don’t care. It’s what you have.
For as much as I hate the cemetery, I’ve been grateful it’s here, too. I miss my wife. It’s easier to miss her at a cemetery, where she’s never been anything but dead, than to miss her in all the places where she was alive.
— John Scalzi, Old Man’s War
Here, Scalzi is doing a couple of things. Notice all of the prejudiced language he uses. His character has opinions and tells the reader about them, while relaying this traumatic core memory. This scene begins the book, with the protagonist saying goodbye to his dead wife before he leaves to sign up for, essentially, the Space Force. Scalzi could have rushed the interaction and simply gotten on with the sci-fi, but instead the reader is treated to this moment of grief. The memory of his dead wife will remain with him throughout the rest of the story.
Building a Memory Core
First: write 2 core scenes from each of the following times in your main character’s life. They don’t have to be long, maybe 500 words or so.
Childhood (8-12)
Young Adult (13-17)
1-2 years before the events of this story
Then: Free write on each scene for a minimum 5 minutes, focusing on how each scene influences your character’s perspective. Bonus: what object/situation in your story triggers these memories?
Why: We relate to the world through our memories. They inform who we are. They are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. They give the illusion that the character is as large as life, that they exist outside of the story structure.
Also: Nothing is neutral. Build prejudice. Your character should always have opinions about things.
It’s not just a guitar. It’s a stupid guitar that Jared insisted on buying her for her 35th birthday because he always liked her voice even though she hated it. She hated it ever since Jimmy Marko made fun of her after the 5th grade talent show; cornered her in the hallway and called her Holler Holly. She’d cried that day, in the library, in the non-fiction section surrounded by piles and piles of books about aircraft carriers and sports teams and what to do if you got a sexually transmitted infection called Her-pees SINplex from kissing a boy on the mouth for too long.
She’d taken a few lessons, but she never could quite get Jimmy Marko’s stupid, voice-cracking chant out of her head: Holler Holly, Holler Holly.
Another example: It’s not just a hairbrush. It’s your wife’s favorite hairbrush that you watched her use every day, spending hours and hours untangling her baby-fine brown hair with dry conditioner and Argan oil. You raise the brush to your nose, one last time, breathe deeply and smell coconut and remember the trip you took to Costa Rica when you were newlyweds, where she [insert spicy sex here].
These scenes can be pre-written before you start your novel, but, for me, they’re scenes that arise organically at emotional points in the story. They don’t have to be long-winded scenes like the one I posted below from my own work. A few lines here and there will do wonders for your character depth.
An example from my own work: Afterglow, originally published in 2019 by Black Hare Press, which I serialized on this Substack:
It was cold in space. She pulled the shiny plastic emergency blanket tighter over her shoulders. The ship’s captain kept the passenger cabins at exactly 65 degrees and 67% humidity to best replicate the projected climate on Earth in Washington, D.C.
It should have been a balmy fall day. The leaves had just started to change in Ohio, turning from green to fiery reds and oranges and yellows. They would fall to the ground with each gust of wind tinged with the barest hint of Erie winter and stick there against the asphalt until crystalline frost turned them brown, plastered by the patter of cool autumn rain. It would smell sweet in the Cuyahoga River valley: like wet rock and wood smoke and damp earth. If she closed her eyes, tuned out the hum of the ship, the whoosh of the air filter system, she could almost hear the crunch of leaves underfoot, the rustle of wind through the trees. Snapping twigs underfoot on a backwoods trail. Her dog panting next to her. The soft coo of her child’s unblemished voice. Her husband’s hand in hers.
Almost.
Now, the world seemed to be defined in “almosts.”
The hum of the ship; the odorless, too-cold air brought her back; ruined the memory and replaced it with the blazing asteroid slamming into Earth. With the swarming Avandii lights spiraling down to her planet’s surface like so many hectic leaves.
Exercise: Ground yourself in the scene
Describe your main character’s house/apartment/home using all 6 of her senses. You read that right, I meant to say 6. The 6th sense is your character’s emotional sense -- or the meaning that they ascribe to objects/places in their life.
As a real-life example: I recently lost my grandmother. It was traumatic in the sense that I somehow ended up doing a lot of her palliative care in her final days. Some time after she died, I was making tomato soup with fresh-picked tomatoes from our garden. Once the soup came together, I walked out of the kitchen and let it simmer. About an hour later, I walked back in, smelled the soup and immediately was transported back to when I was 6 or 7. My grandmother had taken me to this local brunch joint. I’d ordered grilled cheese and tomato soup. She ordered a BLT. All I remember from that day are the smells of comfort food, the sounds of clattering silverware against porcelain, and looking up at one point during the meal to see her absolutely beaming at me, like she was so proud just that I existed. I’ve never had anyone, not even my own parents look at me quite like she did that day. It made me feel like I was the only person in the world.
I’d forgotten that memory for probably twenty years. The smell of the soup triggered the memory and brought me right back to that moment and it was like I re-lived it all over, like she was really there, watching me, looking at me like that.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I sat down and sobbed on the kitchen floor that day, absolutely bereft over the fact that she was gone, that a person who lived the life that she lived was somehow no longer here, and that the world was now a darker place.
Another example: Picture a barking dog. If you’re like me, you picture a hound or a retriever mutt barking at a fence. If you’re like my mother, you see the dog that attacked her as she was walking home from school one day.
“Life is showing. Ideas change us only if they relate to our life. The power is in the experience” — Jerry Cleaver, Immediate Fiction
This emotional sense is ever-present in our everyday life. We surround ourselves with meaning. When I worked for a coffeeshop a few years ago, I saved up tip money for a year to afford a really nice guitar. It’s my favorite not because it sounds better than every other guitar, but because I worked hard for it.
We burn or throw away letters from previous lovers. We hold on to sometimes worthless objects because they belonged to someone who is no longer with us. We treasure memories above money because they make us who we are.
“The old house, the one I had lived in for seven years, from when I was five until I was twelve, that house had been knocked down and was lost for good. The new house, the one my parents had built at the bottom of the garden, between the azalea bushes and the green circle in the grass we called the fairy ring, that had been sold 30 years ago.
I slowed the car as I saw the new house. It would always be the new house in my head. I pulled up into the driveway, observing the way they had built out on the mid 70s architecture. I had forgotten that the bricks of the house were chocolate-brown. The new people had made my mother’s tiny balcony into a two-story sunroom. I stared at the house, remembering less than I had expected about my teenage years: no good times, no bad times. I’d lived in that place for a while, as a teenager. It didn’t seem to be any part of who I was now.
—The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman
Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include this incredible talk by Andrew Stanton. He touches on several things, but one of his main points is contained in the thumbnail below: “Make me care.”
The key to making your reader care isn’t in a twisty plot, a cool magic system, or character competency (seriously, if I have to read one more novel where the main character is Very Confident and Very Pithy and is So Very Special And Wonderful That Everyone Fawns Over Them, I will explode).
Reader buy-in is character vulnerability. It is a shared intimacy between the reader and the protagonist. It is the promise that “you might not be exactly like me, but we have some common ground.” And growing that intimacy starts with building your character a strong memory core to act as a lens through which all events in the story are filtered.