Faithful readers of my blog, and unfaithful readers who I have forced to endure my long-winded ramblings, know that I’ve been working on a “novel” for nearly a year. I put a big chunk of it up on a web site populated by aspiring authors (and, it appears, their many ghost accounts), and received some interesting feedback about the narrative structure. The narrative structure is a bunch of memories, in a seemingly arbitrary order, strung together by a larger and roughly linear series of framing events. People did not like this, because they wanted things to happen in order. Chapter three should happen after chapter two, and that sort of thing.
Maybe, but maybe not. Perhaps if I explain what this book is really about–or at least what I intended it to be about–it will help. Perhaps I can accomplish in a brief blog post what I couldn’t accomplish in a novel.
I forget things; everyone does. At this point in my life, I’ve forgotten much more than I remember. What’s interesting to me is what I do remember–what makes a particular memory persistent, while other memories are gone in a few days. Sometimes the difference is baffling: memories of dramatic, important events disappear while memories of events that seem to have little significance linger and last. And then there are secrets, which seem to be remembered even longer; perhaps they are precious because we know that when they are forgotten, nobody else will remember them and they will truly be gone.
I decided to structure the book around the process of forgetting. It starts with the things that will be forgotten first–even though they might seem memorable–and ends with the last things remembered. It begins with the ephemera and ends with the indelible.
But I’m thinking of switching it around again, to get more readers.
