WRITING
The Siren Song of Memory
Avoiding sentimentality in fiction when using material from our past
Cross-posted on writersdigest.com (January 18, 2025).
I am often reminded of a line from Faulkner’s “Requiem for a Nun,” one that is perhaps quoted too often but remains undeniably true: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
Memories are our powerful and constant companions, surging often from our subconsciousness in the form of nostalgia—a visceral experience of the past. A longing for what was, one that propels us as writers to set stories in a time and place with vivid specificity. Yet that same impulse can mire our writing in wish-fulfilling fantasticating and sentimentality.
My debut novel is, among other things, an homage to my thirty-something San Francisco and Florida escapades in the 1980s.
Thoughts of San Francisco summon up images of fog billowing down Castro Street—music thumping from bars, men lined up outside, cruising for hook-ups. And in a mental conjuring act, I picture Fort Lauderdale’s gangling pelicans trooping across the sky. Or a dark Key West side street: I’m racing toward what the night has in store at some seedy bar, a bedraggled rainbow flag drooping out front.
Like the Sirens’ song, these images compelled the writing of my novel. My past’s golden glow could have led me like the singers’ mythical spell, if not exactly to madness, then at least to muddled thought.
For as eye-opening and liberating as that time was, it was also a difficult one. The beauty and body culture, the hypersexuality rampant in the gay community, burdened someone like me, with so-so looks and a sometimes-fragile sense of self.
And, of course, there was AIDS. All that death and dying.
In creating the material in my book, like Odysseus I had to lash myself to the mast, constrained from sentimentalizing the past. My goal was to capture the essence of those places and that time and distill it onto the page. To fail would be to dishonor the truth of my experience by obscuring its complexity.
Here are some strategies I’ve found helpful in using remembrances to shape fiction that is nuanced and true.
Put setting under a microscope
Whenever I paint myself into a narrative corner, I start describing the heck out of things—the five senses and all that. When you do, you begin to find a way out of the impasse through the ugly cracks in your setting, the dirt under your characters’ fingernails. Discover where all that comes from, and a mood will be suggested through objects and actions. Secrets will arise you can exploit, whether you’re describing places and events from your past or world-building ones on Alpha Centauri.
Create difficult characters
Flawed characters are practically required nowadays in storytelling. You see it in TV shows where every person is a screw-up, who through their quirks somehow manages to save the day. The writers and showrunners subscribe, as I do, to the adage that plot rises out of character. The more flawed our characters, the more specific their inadequacies, the greater the narrative potential we have at our disposal.
Write at a distance
After my time in San Francisco and Florida, for 25 years I lived in Alaska. Although this provided ample fodder for fiction—the view outside my window spectacular, my personal situation fraught—for most of that time I felt too close to my experience to set stories there.
Distance from our material isn’t necessarily fostered by the passing of time. Rather, it’s a habit of extracting yourself from the story while being swept up by it sufficiently to describe it in stark detail. How can you cultivate that remove? Try avoiding first or close third-person narration and experiment with voice that lends itself to objectivity—second- or third-person objective or omniscient, out of favor tools in our me-obsessed moment.
Alternately, map details from your personal history onto characters very different from yourself. Though my fiction sometimes parallels my personal experience as an older gay man, it is just as likely to be shaped around a studious eight-year-old getting a grip after her parents’ breakup. Or a club-hopping Zoomer coming up with zip on his late-night pursuit of love.
Once you’ve established enough distance, you can go back and write the material from whatever person and character you want, only stripped of sentimentality and befuddled thinking.
Suggest what is hidden
When I slip into mawkishness or find myself correcting outcomes to messed-up situations from my past, I double-down on the revision process. There’s always another layer of self-delusion that when peeled away reveals truths about characters and situations that in early drafts feel stereotypical.
The pivot character in my novel is in many ways in sync with ’80s gay culture. He mimics its heteronormative ideals of masculinity—the way of dressing, the dedication to the gym, to nightlife and cruising. But under the conformity are insecurities and a searching need for something at odds with all that, a tension that ended up driving much of the narrative.
Embrace open-ended outcomes
I often fully invest in reading a story, in The New Yorker say, only to have it disappear at the end into thin air. As frustrating as this can be, I get the point. Which is, of course, not to get the point. As writers, to keep our sentimental attachments to the material from leading our characters to pat outcomes. I believe in the common wisdom: that endings should be surprising, yet inevitable. For me this means in part that, to free our stories from the influence of whatever unmet needs linger from our personal experience, our endings must be unresolved.
Yet hopeful.
For ultimately, it is the fiction writer who casts the spell. Who brings characters to some new understanding, one made even more affecting by it being loosely defined. Whether this awareness plays out for good or ill is for our characters themselves to discover after we complete the final sentence. All we can do is bring them to that moment without agenda or easy sentimentality and—with the past we have given them—send them on their way.