Today in "I Am Not a Real Writer," the class for people who don't think they're real writers--yet somehow always discover they are :)--one of the things we briefly discussed was "All Rivers" by Amos Oz.
Besides being a great story, "All Rivers" is structurally interesting in that it might appear to be all flashback, but if you really look, there is a clear present-time progression of action: the action is the narrator sitting at his desk, remembering. It's not him statically sitting there, and then the camera switches to a news report about events that occurred earlier, and then we come back to find him sitting in the same position. (Which is how people too often try to do flashback.) Rather, it's him at his desk actively engaging with the process of memory. This is an important thing to note for memoir too. It's nearly always about more than "what happened in the past;" it's also about the act of attempting to remember.
This touches on themes that come up often in class. What constitutes "action" vs "flashback?" Can a memory be written one way as flashback, another way as exposition, and another way as present action (as in the Oz story)? When writing memoir, what do you do with the fact that memory is imperfect--or rather, that it is its own living, personal thing, and not a recording device you can take back to a fixed past?
✨✨✨Things to think about.✨✨✨
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