Lies, Damn Lies, and Useful Misrememberings

In a very early draft of my first novel, A Dream of Death, one of my beta readers said of my protagonist, Kate: “The problem is, she asks questions and people tell her what she wants to know. Where’s the conflict?”

Ouch. I should have known better. In real life, people don’t always tell the truth. They lie. They spin the facts. And they misremember.

LIES AND DAMN LIES

Most of us understand lying. The bad guy isn’t going to admit his misdeeds simply because someone asks. He’s going to deny his involvement, concoct an alibi, and point the protagonist in the wrong direction. Other characters lie, too—not necessarily to cover their guilt but to conceal a secret they don’t want others to know. They were somewhere they shouldn’t have been, with someone they shouldn’t have known, doing something that, if it were revealed, would damage their reputations or disrupt their lives in serious ways. Lies are useful tools writers can use to add plot complexity, plant red herrings, and prevent readers from guessing the truth too early.

MISREMEMBERING

There’s another tool writers can use as well, one that may not spring automatically to mind—faulty or incomplete memories. In a crime novel, let’s say, the sleuth interviews an innocent suspect who tells the truth as he or she remembers it. But that’s the problem. Memory is at best a partial version of the truth, and no two people ever remember the exact same things. Police professionals tell us, in fact, that if every witness to a crime tells the same story, they’ve probably worked it out in advance. Memories of past events are recorded in our brains with varying degrees of fidelity.

People misremember, and that can be incredibly useful to the writer of fiction as a tool to ramp up conflict, reveal character, and set the stage for plot twists and satisfying resolutions.

Here are four ways writers can use the psychology of memory to ramp up a killer plot:

• Setting Up Misdirection and Delay

Lies aren’t the only method for sending a sleuth in the wrong direction. People’s memories are selective—we tend to remember what we’re paying attention to at the time. And those memories can fade or distort over time. Psychologists tell us the very act of remembering affects how that memory is subsequently filed away. Like the old telephone game, every time a memory is retrieved, there’s the possibility of added distortion. Distorted memories make the job of your protagonist harder—which is what you want, right? Intensify the conflict. Send him in the wrong direction. Make her believe something that isn’t true. Give your POV character—and the reader—a false impression that must be later overturned. In other words, use the misremembering of your secondary characters to create ways for your main character to initially fail.

• Revealing Character

People tend to remember details that are personally significant to them—especially those that are emotionally significant. What a character remembers about an event is a good way of revealing that character’s inner truth, especially the parts they’ve worked hard to conceal. On the other hand, what a character doesn’t remember can be even more significant than what he does. People are often self-deluded, constructing personal mythologies in an attempt to shape their lives as they would like them to be rather than as they really are. Repressed memories exact an emotional toll. Use the emotional underpinnings of memory to create characters that are fully rounded human beings with fears, flaws, faults, and failings,

• Equipping Your Antagonist

False memories are as powerful as real ones—maybe more so—and false memories can be implanted for nefarious purposes. We’ve all heard of gaslighting, convincing someone they’re wrong about something when they’re not, or, when taken to the extreme, psychologically manipulating someone into questioning their own sanity. Related to gaslighting is the implanting of false memories—causing people to “remember” something that never happened. Vivid dreams can be stored as actual memories. False memories can also be created by hearing a story so often that you picture it in your mind. What you “remember” isn’t the event but the image you created. We’ve all had that experience. But what if your antagonist intentionally implants a false memory in someone for an evil purpose? Now that’s wicked.

• Creating that Aha Moment

Every story has a conclusion, even if it’s only partial. Red herrings are seen for what they are, the facts click into place, and (in most crime fiction anyway) justice is restored. The aha moment is that time when connections are made, when the fog of confusion lifts and your protagonist perceives the truth at last. Think of Hercule Poirot just before he gathers all the suspects together for the big reveal.

Two aspects of memory can help writers create a believable aha moment. One is déjà vu, a French phrase meaning “already seen,” the sense we all have from time to time that what we’re seeing or experiencing at the moment has already happened. Psychologists differ on the precise mechanism of déjà vu, but most believe that something in the present experience reminds us on a deep, unconscious level of a previous experience we can’t immediately identify. For writers, an experience of déjà vu on the part of a character can be the catalyst that ushers in the final scenes—the aha moment in which the protagonist makes the mental connection that solves the conflict. The trigger can be as subtle as a familiar scent.

A related mechanism for bringing a story to a conclusion is the “flashbulb memory,” the unexpected triggering of an emotionally intense experience by seemingly innocuous or random events. Something stored in the deep recesses of a character’s memory springs to her conscious mind in a way that clarifies everything. Aha!

The Shadow of Memory

In The Shadow of Memory, the fourth book in the Kate Hamilton Mysteries, events that took place fifty-eight years earlier are the key to solving a modern crime—if Kate can wade through the evidence that remains, the lies and the misrememberings, to find the shocking truth. The epigraph sets the stage:

“Memory was a slippery thing—slick moss on an unstable slope—and it wasever so easy to lose one’s footing and fall.”

Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

How can you use the psychology of memory to add conflict, reveal character, equip your antagonist, and create that final aha moment?

Have you read a book recently that used the psychology of memory?

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