On Writing and Storytelling: When Memory Supplies the Dialogue

When Memory Supplies the Dialogue

One of the strange things about writing a story set fifty years ago is discovering what memory decided to keep.

Not necessarily the important things.

Sometimes what survives is a voice.

I’ve been working on Chapter Five, “Home Turf,” of And the Horse You Rode in On…, my current Jim Garraty story about Jim and Mark Prieto when they were eleven years old. As usual, some of what happens in the story is invented, some is rearranged, and some of it grew out of things I remember from my childhood.

The chapter takes Jim and Mark into the home of another boy, Patrick Blanchard. Patrick and his family are fictional characters, but the household owes quite a bit to a real family I knew when I was growing up.

And while I was writing Mrs. Blanchard, something funny happened.

I could hear her.

Not in any spooky sense. I haven’t suddenly acquired a hotline to 1976.

But I could hear the cadence of the woman who partly inspired her. I remembered the way she spoke to her sons and to the neighborhood children who seemed to drift in and out of the house.

At one point, Patrick comes home from school and answers his mother casually:

“What?”

Her response came almost automatically:

“Don’t ‘what’ me. Come here.”

That’s the sort of line I could probably spend twenty minutes trying to invent and make less convincing with every revision.

Instead, I knew what she sounded like.

There are other pieces of that household that memory has hung onto. I remember iced tea. I remember dinners involving things like Hamburger Helper or Tuna Helper. I remember children congregating at the house after school. I remember a mother who seemed to know what was going on throughout the neighborhood and kept telephone numbers written down in a notebook.

And I remember something that happened often enough that it seemed perfectly ordinary at the time.

A couple of kids would be at the house when dinnertime approached. Naturally, we would say that we had to ask our mothers if we could stay.

Too late.

She had already called them.

As a child, I didn’t think there was anything particularly remarkable about this. That was simply what she did. Looking back at it as an adult, though, I think it’s wonderfully evocative of a particular kind of neighborhood life.

And that’s the material I’m trying to capture in And the Horse You Rode in On….

The story is set in 1975 and 1976, but I don’t want to keep reminding the reader that it’s the 1970s. I’d rather let the period emerge through what the characters take for granted: walking home from school, telephone numbers in notebooks, color televisions that still seemed worth bragging about, Wacky Packages, iced tea, Tuna Helper, and mothers who somehow knew where everybody’s children were.

Memory is useful that way.

The historian in me wants to verify dates, geography, prices, television schedules, and all the other things that can be checked. That’s important. Memory can be unreliable, and nostalgia can make the past tidier than it really was.

But there are some things no reference book can give me.

A reference book can’t tell me what it felt like to step from a hot, sticky South Florida afternoon into somebody else’s air-conditioned house.

It can’t tell me which friend’s mother kept track of the neighborhood.

And it certainly can’t reproduce the exact warning contained in a mother’s voice when her son answered:

“What?”

Sometimes the novelist must invent.

Sometimes the historian has to research.

And occasionally, if I’m lucky, memory simply hands me the dialogue.