The Spark That Ignites The Memory

'Seldom have I heard a train pass by in the night and not wished I was on it.'

Flash!

This is an opening sentence of a book I love. Or rather it is not. At the start of Paul Theroux's 'The Great Indian Railway Bazar' he writes:

'Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.'

I have adapted it in my mind to better fit what unlocks my own memories. 

I lived away from my native England a lot as a child – Singapore (where I was born), Malaysia, Germany – and used to return to Folkestone in Kent for holidays to stay with my grandparents. They were the happiest of times. My grandparents lived close to the main railway line to London. I am old enough to remember steam trains. I used to stand on the footbridge and wave at the engine drivers as they sped under me. At night I would lie in the front bedroom, listening for the telltale rumble as another train gathered speed from the distant station, and I'd lie there picturing it beneath the bridge – the driver at the controls, the passengers still sorting out luggage on the racks or unfolding their newspapers. Looking out at the lights and the goings-on in the windows of houses as they passed. I strained my ears listening to the sound of the clacking wheels as it rushed on through the night into the distance. Reading Paul Theroux's opening words for the first time (and every time since), caused a kind of spark in my mind, followed by the unlocking of all these memories. I was back there. The sound of the trains. The smell of the smoke from the steam trains. The smell of those old station waiting rooms. The smell of my grandparents' house and the fruit-bowl in the living-room. 

Not all writers can achieve this on-cue. At least not with a wide audience. It is what I look for in a writer and it is also, of course, what I strive to achieve myself as a writer. In order to achieve it one probably needs a good understanding of people. Empathy. We also need to read widely in order to see how other writers do it and we need to be aware of what excites these sparks in other readers. I find social media very useful in this respect. Twitter is particularly helpful, because of the 140 character limitation. Often I tweet a single sentence from one of my books or from a short story. I can fairly reliably gauge what sparks peoples imagination and unlocks their memories the most, by the number of favourites and retweets I get (allowing for possible influences of time). This way I am constantly building up and adapting an arsenal of incendiary words and phrases, or subject matter, that I know have power. Some last, where others are dependent upon what is happening in the world at the time, but it is a great way to train yourself and to stay sharp.

The sentence that regularly receives the most notice when I post on Twitter is:

'The chink of bottles, somewhere in the early morning traffic haze' 

This seems to have that special power to cause sparks in people's minds and to unlock memories. I think we must all have been there. Stepping out into the street in the relative hush of the early morning. In this case there is activity - hence the haze caused by commuter traffic fumes, perhaps a low level hum - but there is an absence of sound clutter. The stillness is very apparent to us. Then, all of a sudden in this void there is a sharp sound. Not loud, but very noticeable. It is immediately recognisable as the chink of two bottles as they bang together. Our imagination lights up. We picture a milkman, perhaps, walking hurriedly from his milk-float (cart / van) to a terrace of houses, carrying a rack containing six cold, white bottles covered in condensation. The curtains in the houses are still drawn. A cat sitting on the step of number 8 darts out of the milkman's way. He is whistling a happy tune as he steps across a low fence to the next house. He'll be in trouble if he's seen. He has been asked by the lady at number 10 not to do that. Her mesembryanthemums are getting damaged. Why don't Blue Tits peck the tops off milk bottles to drink the cream anymore? Why doesn't milk taste like it used to? Why did granddad's porridge always taste better than your mum's and who was that boy you knew who used to faint at the breakfast table and once fell face first into his bowl of cornflakes?

The fact is that the chink you heard could have been caused by a marble being rolled by two boys at a coke bottle while they waited for the school bus. It could have been a lady putting glass jars into a recycle bin or  a wino waking up in a shop doorway and knocking over his empty cider bottle. But our minds and memories are acutely tuned. There are minute differences. Knowing this is important for a writer who wants to unlock people's memories. Not that sparking a host of different memories is necessarily a problem. I notice this now when I am reading. I learn from it. 

N.B. The real life situation that inspired this piece of flash fiction (see previous post - Show Don't Tell) was set at a street cafe in Luang Prabang, Laos. An old vagrant lady was collecting discarded bottles for money. She actually lived in a kitchen cabinet on some waste ground by the road and used to blow cigarette smoke out through the plug-hole in the sink. But that doesn't matter. It has the power to unlock memories and I don't mind if those are different to the ones I experienced. The story is covered in full in the book Long Road Hard Lessons. 


So who does it best and how do they achieve it?

Understanding people and being observant, I think. Having a good breadth of life experience also helps, but most of all I think it is about empathy. How much a writer notices the feelings we share. As someone who loves to read short stories, I am bound to say that I feel it is often best achieved by great short story writers. Less is more. These writers are adept and focussing on what are the key elements. The concentrated bits of information that expand inside the minds of readers like one of those dried Chinese flowers in a cup of tea, when the hot water is poured in. There is no space for lengthy explanations. The writer must transport the reader with a single sentence or even a word. A flash, as a memory is unlocked and proceeds to unfold, and unfold. And with that perfect principle in mind, I will say no more. I will simply take the books of two great writers at random from the shelf behind me and give you the opening sentence of each. In each case, so little opens up so much in our head.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (one of the best exponents of 'less is more')

'To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.'

Wildlife by Richard Ford

'In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him.'

If you would like to read the bestselling travel book 'Long Road, Hard Lessons' by Mark Swain,

you can find this along with his two collections of short stories on Amazon, Smashwords etc.

In the UK you can also find his books in all branches of Waterstones Bookshops.

Mark Swain on Amazon.com

Mark Swain on Amazon UK

Mark Swain on Smashwords

Show Don't Tell

In Praise of Shorter Stories

Ernest Hemingway famously said,

"If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water."

It has been pointed out by others, that 'showing' takes more words than 'telling'. I disagree. Poetry manages to convey so much in so few words. By employing certain powerful words that trigger emotions and memories in the reader / listener, the writer can open up a myriad of thought and feelings that do not need to be written down. It is the reason we enjoy quotations so much. To convey the sentiment of an entire tome within
a few well chosen words. Powerful. I try hard to remember this principle in my own writing process. It is far from easy. Firstly you tend to slip back into 'telling' without realising it. It's less effort. With dedication and a certain amount of luck (feeling right at the time), I might spot my errors of 'too much telling' during my editing process and improve them. The great Raymond Carver wrote a wonderfully straightforward essay on this subject entitled, unsurprisingly, 'On Writing.'

Generally I get most pleasure from reading short stories. Chekov, Raymond Carver and Richard Ford are my particular favourites although I have many more. Many novelists also write excellent short stories, or have done in the past. Steinbeck, Hemingway, Orwell, Katherine Mansfield, John Updike, Norman Mailer are just a few. I read a Margaret Atwood short story recently that I especially liked. Steinbeck and Orwell in particular, seem to me to write novels in the condensed style common to short story writers. It is often thought of as characteristic of American writing and Steinbeck appears to utilise the 'show don't tell' principle very effectively. In his great novella, The Pearl, Steinbeck manages to convey so much of the emotions, the cultural background, the sense of family that is fundamental to the motivations of the characters, without actually telling us in words. It is the 'less is more' rule demonstrated at its finest. Steinbeck plants a seed with an image, a perfectly chosen simple word or two and the reader's imagination does the rest. The Pearl is only 90 pages long but those are some of the most powerful 90 pages I have ever read. Incidentally it has been pointed out to me that some of Hemingway's prose runs into some lengthy drawn out passages of agonising detail. I confess I do not like all his work and I think he could have learned a lot from the likes of Steinbeck. Perhaps his impulsively bullish character made up for it in charm, however.

Often when I write a short story, I end up editing it into several versions of differing length. Initially I did this in order to enter my stories into writing competitions, which usually require stories limited to a maximum number of words. It took me a little time to discover that readers always seem to get most from the shortest versions. Stories I have refined and refined, condensing them down to an essence. Sometimes these are short enough to be called what have come to be named 'Flash Stories.' In this form, the story seems to more effectively capture people's imagination. Some readers, I find, have interpreted the story differently to others. This is bound to happen with the 'show, don't tell' technique, where people are using their own background experiences to fill in the gaps. Some writers might balk at this. They want their readers to understand exactly what is in their (the writer's) mind. This is not a problem I suffer from. I am happy for my stories to be a trigger that opens up a number of slightly different stories in each reader's mind.

I accept that the experience of readers preferring my shortest stories could be peculiar to me, but I do not think it likely. Raymond Carver in his essay, On Writing, talks about how when he was at university, all American writers were trained in this way - a process of continuous condensing and reducing. Checkov and many others also believed this process to be necessary in training writers. Most people find it very enlightening. I certainly do. I would encourage all fiction (even non-fiction) writers, therefore, to try it. I think we should all periodically repeat it as an exercise throughout our lives. Take a piece you have written – a story, an essay or an article perhaps – and condense it. Set yourself a word number as a target. Once you have achieved this, try producing a shorter version, perhaps a third shorter than the last. Continue until you have something of about 140 words, then show it to someone who knows the full length story well, and see what the result is.

Of course an example is perhaps the best means of explanation. Here is an example of a flash story that began life as a short story of around 4,000 words. It has been published at two different lengths but this shorter version tends to receive the most praise:

The Bottle Lady of Luang Prabang. By Mark Swain. From the book 'The Truth In The Lie'

Days pass slowly, most beginning with breakfast at our street café. Lethargic and oppressed by the heat of the day, we take our usual table outside on the street, amusing ourselves with small goings on, exercising our powers of observation and hypothesis.

Today our attention is drawn by the chink of glass from somewhere in the early morning traffic haze. Across the road we see a haggard old woman with a handcart, collecting bottles and sorting them on a small patch of waste ground adjacent to a hotel. A kitchen cupboard lays dumped there. I propose she lives in it. Comic, the others think, until she climbs inside and slides the door shut. We stare, waiting, but she stays put. Our focus shifts to our breakfast. Feu – clear soup with a basket of English country garden to throw into it.

Some time later a policeman arrives. He knocks on the old lady’s door. Abruptly it slides open.

“Look, he’s going to move her on,” I say.

But no, handing her a coffee and a cigarette he passes the time of day and departs, tipping his hat. We pay-up and leave. Normally we might have put forward theories about her – she is his mother, or an informant perhaps, keeping a watch over the neighbourhood. But not today. Today we are unsettled. Quietly we pay and leave.

No decision is made to cross the street, yet we do so without hesitation. Passing her camp we notice a strange phenomenon. Smoke exuding from the plughole of the sink. A silvery plume rising in the still air. An ethereal, swirling rope, climbing to the heavens.

Reluctant, ill-fitting legs carry us back to our guesthouse, our minds still entwined in the rising smoke. Incredulity has left us silent – spellbound.

In 2008/9 Mark Swain cycled from Ireland to Tokyo, a journey of 10,000 miles, with his 18 year old son Sam. If you would like to read their bestselling travel book 'Long Road, Hard Lessons', you can find this, along with his two collections of short stories - including THE TRUTH IN THE LIE, on Amazon, Smashwords etc. 

In the UK his books can also be found in all Waterstones Bookstores.

Mark Swain on Amazon.com

Mark Swain on Amazon UK

Mark Swain on Smashwords