Chinese whispers, or reshaping memories to create fiction

Children probably still play Chinese whispers. It had great currency in my youth. You whispered a phrase to your neighbour and she to hers, and so it passed down the line. There was much hilarity when one discovered what the original message had morphed into. The best-known one began life as, “Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance.”

We mishear all the time, most noticeably in song. I happily sang “Graham threw a rasher on the 45”, along with lots of other people, instead of “brimful of Asha on the 45”. It’s our acceptance of ludicrous lyrics that we habitually repeat that makes it so funny.

I caught my partner joining in with a song on the radio. It was Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton's hit Islands in the Stream, but he had somehow heard: "Hives of industry, that is what we are . . . "

In pubs you might have heard the old favourite where the "thrush ate the robin and two balls of twine" (Rose of Mooncoin) and, of course, we end up "shoving Connie around the field" as the last line of the Irish national anthem.

There's such a thing as misremembering, too. There's the old song from Gigi called I Remember It Well where the man and woman disagree about the circumstances of their last rendezvous in every detail except the most important: that they had fallen in love.

Memory fastens on to visual and aural detail but also on to texture. Trying to recall a name will often start with a texture. You know the word has a double consonant, or a sibilant, or you know the number of syllables or the initial letter. You work your way through the alphabet, and eventually, perhaps when you have stopped thinking about it, the word pops out.

A friend complained of moving dots just outside his vision, and I knew of the condition but couldn’t place the term. I knew that it began with an F and had a lot of vowel sounds. “Floaters” finally surfaced, if you’ll pardon the pun.

But we can also wildly misremember things. I have a poor memory. I have met people with far superior recall. I tend to hold on to emotional realities more than factual ones. I recount my childhood in a way that is alien to my sister’s memory. It can be disconcerting, and one wonders if the past is ever stable or if it’s like the river for Heraclitus, who tells us that you can never step into the same water twice.

Writing fiction is also about changing the facts to tell the truth. Writers reach into their experience but usually tweak it to preserve its emotional integrity. Things as they are, without literary heightening, do not work on the page; the trick is showing, not telling, and that involves inventive re-creation.

I know this because I have tried to write books. I stick to autobiographical detail, assuming that if it is true for me then it will ring true for the reader. What I’m failing to pick up on, of course, is the essence of the experience. If I could capture that, then surely I could write well.

The essence of the experience is elusive, however. Some writers explore very foreign territory and move far from their own lives. Some research their subject and do it seamlessly, so the reader feels an intimacy with the characters and setting. But all of these writers have to fumble for the right word and register, and they too rely on memory or misremembering for emotional truth.

By the way, for younger readers, that famous Chinese whisper became: “Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance.”

Isabelle Cartwright is a member of the Association of Freelance Editors, Proofreaders and Indexers