Here's a question for all authors out there. Do you ever struggle to remember the characters in your books? Especially the incidental characters, created on the hoof?
I have to confess that I do, particularly once the book is published and I've moved onto the next story. Unforgivable really, but perhaps not surprising as I killed the character in the first of my trilogy of eco-thrillers, The Human Race, and the character does not feature in the sequel, which is due for publication early next year.
However it still bugged me and when I got home I remembered an article I had read in The Times about improving your memory. Still blushing at my own lapse, I dug it out and read it again for inspiration. Initially it was quite promising: the journalist Joshua Foer had covered the USA Memory Championships as a freelancer and, because he had such an appalling memory (he couldn't even remember where he'd left his keys - something we have in common!) he decided to enter the following year. While training for the competition, one of his main techniques was to use what the ancient Greeks refer to as a Memory Palace: a simple mental technique of associating numbers, names or objects with vivid visual imagery in order to remember them more easily.
My Memory Palace
Some of the current memory masters have several hundred Memory Palaces and it clearly works. One poor soul could recall pi to 83,481 decimal points, while another was able to recite the whole of Paradise Lost. Obviously my goal was slightly less ambitious and I decided to start off with a simple task, aiming to recall just ten of my minor characters from The Human Race. I won't bore you with their names but I dutifully located them all in my Memory Palace, by drawing upon my route up to my writing shed. I pictured one on the deck, one by the large rhododendron bush, another by the kids' climbing frame, a fourth by an old quarry and so on.
Apparently the key to really good recall is imagining strange situations or stories, which incorporate the object or person that you are trying to remember. According to the 2,000-year-old Latin textbook, Rhetorica ad Herennium, "the funnier, lewder and more bizarre the better". This was getting more fun by the minute! So, I dutifully began placing my characters in odd situations and, dare I say, rude postures - but it wasn't working. One of my character's names is Haraldur Sveinsson; another is called Magnus Morson. The immediate problem was that while I could remember their bawdy goings on at the location in the Palace, I couldn't recall who was doing what!
So I had another idea.
Why not associate the characters with people I knew and place them in the situation? A little different, admittedly, but necessity is the mother of all invention. So for Haraldur Sveinsson, I used the name of my Grandpa, Harold and Sven-Göran Eriksson, the ex-England Football Manager. It seemed to work! In my Memory Palace I had my 101-year-old Grandpa with the ex-manager of England on the climbing frame. So far, so good.
Next: Magnus Morson. The presenter of Mastermind was called Magnus. I struggled a little bit with Morson but eventually settled on Magnus tapping out a Morse code signal on the deck. Two days later I tested myself.
My Memory Palace collapsed like a house of cards.
Was it Harold with Magnus or Sven with Haw, my Grandpa's surname? And for some reason Ulrika Jonsson had entered my Memory Palace completely uninvited and I knew she wasn't supposed to be there, but was connected to someone! Must be Eriksson as I know my Grandpa never dated her. Or was she with Magnus? It sounds Swedish. Now I'm confused, embarrassed and not sure if my character's name is Sven Haw or Harold Erikson. Clearly I need a lot more practice, but I also need to write. I have now spent precious hours trying to remember these names!
Perhaps I should ditch the Memory Palace and follow what Einstein once said:
"Why should I memorise something I can so easily get from a book?"
I think I will take my chances next time, prepare better on the day and rely on the "Find" function in Microsoft Word if I am absolutely desperate to find the answer...