Fortunately we have the internet to supplement our memories now, but any writer of fiction knows that the foundation of their tales is their store of remembrances—good and bad.
The good memories are as important as the bad, in that they allow us to bring a celebration of human life into our stories-without which those stories might lack appeal. They lighten the darker episodes. They enrich our characters with likable traits. The good memories can soften our recounting of the bad memories so that our readers are willing to endure a dark tale and not feel abused by it.
But often it’s the bad memories that motivate our fiction writing efforts, just as it is the bad memories we most often remember when contemplating distant events. If you spend any time at all revisiting your childhood you know that the occurrences you are likely to remember are the bad ones; the ones that hurt, the ones that damaged.
The ordinary, everyday activities that you enjoyed with your parents, siblings and childhood friends are often forgotten, or overshadowed, by the “bad” memories.
Our minds are drawn to moments of fear and pain in our past in much the same way we are made to gawk at car accidents as we slowly drive by them. Perhaps some survival instinct hard-wired into our psyches forces our attention to images of danger and suffering as a teaching device—so that we will remember what not to experience. The urge to see how another human is suffering can be as strong as a narcotic.
Not all of us are attracted to scenes of violence and misery to the same degree, but so many of us are that we can’t just write this behavior off as some sick abnormality in the collective human personality. But if you are drawn to the darker side, you’ll probably love a good mystery, like the ones I write.
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