Writing with memory issues: just get it down!
As a neurodivergent human with anxiety and depression, I can attest to the difficulties in remembering
Writing with memory issues: just get it down! As a neurodivergent human with anxiety and depression, I can attest to the difficulties in remembering many of the great ideas, lines, character and story notes and research thoughts that pour through me.
If I do not write them down post-haste they often disappear, like ships lazily but steadily shrinking as they head toward the horizon and disappear.
And if that was not enough, I suffered a TBI that also exacerbated my faulty short and long-term memory (and anxiety/depression) for many years.
I find that by writing down my ideas when the bubble first floats to the top of my skull, that I will henceforth continue to remember that portion of story.
Somehow, what magic is this-for I do not know, the act of physically writing that little thought, that one-liner, that character name – or a whole damn scene, for that matter – imprints it in your memory.
I got rid of my George Costanza wallet a few years back for a small Lochby zippered notebook holder where I keep an inked fountain pen and a tiny notebook, and a credit card, metro card, and if I am flush, some cash.
You need not write that Eureka moment on paper, though that helps - I wrote “Writing SFF With Paper and Pen Spurs Memory and Creativity” for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association – and I also rely on my phone’s voice recorder when I cannot use my hands, and even a Proton doc in the cloud works in a pinch.
I feel lucky to have the super powers of last minute execution, of hyper empathy, and many more, but also, I have made it a habit, a life’s mission, to get the words down.
Get the words down.
It is not always possible to move, let alone write, especially when our mental health and brains and chemicals and bodies bloodily fight us.
Even when I am feeling so down that I am mired in a pit, paralyzed, even when I am so anxious I shake in a curled ball in a safe space drowning in thoughts, I still yearn to write.
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