I walked into a workshop on memory as storytelling, expecting to learn something about writing. I walked out thinking about the mind.
We spent the day talking about three ideas of memory—Proustian, Bergsonian, and Philip K. Dickian. Three ways of understanding something we all possess and yet never fully grasp. I had encountered these names before in passing, mostly in literary conversations, but this was the first time I was asked not just to understand them, but to write through them.
When we finally stopped discussing memory and started writing from it, the theories became something else entirely.
The Philip K. Dick memory implant exercise did something I hadn't expected. It placed me at the centre of the novel I have been working on for years. Until that moment, I had never imagined that story in the first person. The protagonist had always been someone I observed from a distance. And there I was, writing as though I had always belonged inside the story. A few hundred words poured out almost without effort, and when I looked up, I had goosebumps. It felt as though I had stumbled into a version of the novel that had always existed, just waiting for me to find it.
Marcel Proust understood memory as something involuntary. A smell, a taste, or a texture can suddenly collapse time and return you to a moment you weren't looking for. In Search of Lost Time begins with a madeleine dipped in tea, but almost all of us have our own version of that madeleine. A perfume. The first rain. The sound of a pressure cooker in the next apartment.
Henri Bergson offers another way of thinking about memory. The past accompanies us, shaping every present moment. We perceive through everything we have already lived. Reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, I often felt time behaving in exactly this way. The past isn't revisited. It's never really left.
The Proustian object exercise nudged me in an entirely different direction. An ordinary object became the key to a memory I had never quite found the language for. It wasn't a dramatic revelation or a forgotten childhood incident. It was an emotion that had lived somewhere beneath words until that moment. I don't know if I would have reached it any other way.
When everyone began reading their pieces aloud, I realised we had all taken the same exercise and travelled to completely different places. Some stories had become science fiction. Others unfolded as dystopian worlds. One person wandered into fantasy. A few stayed startlingly close to real life. We had all started from memory, but memory had carried each of us somewhere entirely our own. We often speak of memory as though it were an archive, as though our minds faithfully store events, ready to retrieve them whenever we need. But the workshop challenged that assumption.
Then there's Philip K. Dick, whose stories ask a far more unsettling question: What if memory itself cannot be trusted? What if it can be implanted, manipulated, or fabricated? His novels and stories are about identity, and if your memories can change, where do you begin?
Maybe that's why two people can live through the same afternoon and remember it differently years later.
We assume memory preserves events, but what if it preserves meaning instead?
As writers, we often chase accuracy. We ask ourselves if we remembered the dialogue correctly, whether the sequence of events is right, and whether we are being faithful to what happened. But maybe the more interesting question is whether we are being faithful to what the memory has become.
The workshop wasn't really about memory techniques. It was about permission to trust that what emerges on the page may not be factual in the strictest sense, but can still be emotionally true.
I walked in thinking memory looked backwards. I left wondering if memory has been writing our stories all along.