I am taking a class about writing creative non-fiction. All of my classmates are 55+, and all are struggling with fleshing out the whiffs of memory that are buried in their lives.
"How do you find the detail?" asks one woman who wanted to write about an event in her childhood.
"Look at old Life magazines," someone replies.
So is memory just an outline in our minds like the pictures in a coloring book? Do we supply the colors later as we massage the memory and flesh out how it probably happened?
For childhood memories, do we use the colors of our adult life?
I guess the answer to those questions is "yes" with a few qualifiers thrown in. We can't stay within the lines of our memories. We must branch out a little -- letting the reds and yellows of the details we provide bleed across the boundaries.
And that is where the fun begins.
