We all want the perfect family and the perfect day, but the stories come from the problems and troubles. We want it to be easy; we want it to be simple; we want it to be pure joy. But life is more complicated than that, and your stories should be, too!

Here are some more tips for writers that holiday celebrations drive home:

1) Unwrapping half the fun? Worrying about being able to smile and thank Aunt Matilda for the horrible present keep you up at night? Anticipation is more involving than payoff. See my blog on withholding.

2) Shared childhood? Hardly! Each person remembers different moments, different aspects of what happened and who did what and what pieces of the world around mattered. Hence the interrelation of point of view, plot, character and setting. Who tells the story will determine what gets recounted, what gets noticed and remembered.

3) When everything is happening all at once, it’s exciting, but it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on, let alone appreciate it. Sequences and causality support the creation of meaning.

No matter what kind of holiday (or childhood) you had, you can use it to strengthen yourself as a writer. The interior narrator, like the interior soundtrack, can get you through a lot until you’re back to the wide expanse of your own blank page.

Quick:

What do you remember about March 7, 2005?

What do you remember about September 11, 2001?

Now, for all I know, you were a teenager giving birth on March 7, 2005. Or, like someone I know, you lost your spouse of sixty years on 9/11/01, and that’s what you remember. But if you are like me, nothing special happened on March 7, 1995, and you don’t remember it at all. Whereas on a day, some years earlier, everything seemed to be changing, and you remember where you were, what you were doing, who you called, what you did next . . . unless you were so traumatized that you’ve blocked major portions of your day. Memory is a storyteller. Or perhaps it would make more sense to say that stories are patterned after the human mind and soul, which is to say, the human memory.

What can the storyteller learn from human memory?

1) Not all events are equal. Not everything is part of the story just because it happened, too, just as not all the marble in the block became part of Michaelangelo’s David.

2) Details become very important when life is in crisis. The memory zeros in on the physical world. (See #4)

3) Build up, backstory and filling in the in between stuff are NOT important: jump cuts are part of human memory and serve story well.

4) Actions reveal character. You are fascinated by what you and everyone else did. Interior monologue is largely left out of memory. What you wore, who you touched, where you went–these are what stick and carry all the meaning.

5) Change–or the enormous and powerful possibility of change–are at the heart of memory and story.

Story and memory are the heightened bits, repressed or vivid, that move us to peer closely or to turn away. Everything else is just another day.

Authenticity note: I was living at 12th Street and Avenue A in the LES on Sept. 11, 2001 and teaching at Pratt in Brooklyn that morning.

What will you always remember? What have you learned from memory?