Maybe There’s Still Hope

Some dialogue from Glimmetrain’s Writers Ask newsletter this morning, courtesy of Pulitzer Prize winner, Robert Olen Butler:

WA: You keep a lot of information in your head.

ROB: No I don’t. I have a very bad memory. In fact Graham Greene once siad, and I’m paraphrasing because I can’t remember the quote, that all good novelists have bad memories. He says what you remember comes out as journalism. What you forget goes into the compost of the imagination. And that compost heap is the same as the dream space or the unconscious I’ve been talking about. You know, there are writers in the world who are quite wonderful – they tell wonderful anecdotes and you can sit all night and listen to them talk. They’re brilliant people and you wonder why they never wrote even better books than they have, and I think the answer is that they’ve never forgotten anything. Their literal memories are so strong, they are terrific anecdotists, but their unconscious has never been fully stocked with the deeper essences of all the stories that they carry around with them.

There’s hope for me yet! Because I have a very bad memory or, at the very least, a faulty memory. Once or twice a week, Dave will say “don’t you remember that?” or “don’t you remember telling me that?” Um….no. Really, I don’t. I was beginning to worry I was in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s because so many people have better memories than I do. They call up things from two days ago that I’ve already forgotten. But maybe my mind is a big old stinking compost heap of stuff just waiting to come out in fiction. Whew. I feel better.