Enough talk about today’s world—let’s get back to the aspiring novelist. As I have said, the challenge is not to form value judgments but, rather, to stockpile as much material as possible in its original form. To create an inner space in which it can all be stored. Of course, realistically, it is impossible to retain everything. There is a limit to how much our memory can hold. Thus, we need a minimal kind of information-processing system to reduce the amount.
In most cases, I try to fix a few telling details about the event （or the person, or the scene） in my mind. Since it is hard to recall （or, having attempted to remember, easy to forget） the whole picture, it is best to try to extract specific features in a form that can be easily held for safekeeping. This is what I mean by a minimal system.
What sorts of features? They tend to be those striking details that make you sit up straight, that fix themselves in your mind. Ideally, those things that can’t be explained away. It is best if they are illogical, or counter the flow of events in a subtle way, or tempt you to question them, or suggest some kind of mystery. You gather these bits, affix a simple label （place, time, situation） and mentally file them away in your personal chest of drawers. It is possible, of course, to jot them down on a notepad or something of the sort, but I prefer to trust my mind. It’s a real pain to carry a pad around, and I have found that once I have jotted something down I tend to relax and forget it. If I toss the bits into my mind, on the other hand, what needs to be remembered stays while the rest fades into oblivion. I like to leave things to this process of natural selection.
This reminds me of an anecdote I’m fond of. When Paul Valéry was interviewing Albert Einstein, he asked the great scientist, “Do you carry a notebook around to record your ideas?” Einstein was an unflappable man, but this question clearly unnerved him. “No,” he answered. “There’s no need for that. You see I rarely have new ideas.”
Come to think of it, there have been very few situations when I wished I had a notepad on me. Something truly important is not that easy to forget once you’ve entrusted it to your memory.
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Your mental chest of drawers is a great asset when you set to work on a novel. Neatly put-together arguments and value judgments aren’t much use for those of us who write fiction. More often than not, they impede us by blocking the natural flow of the story. If you have stockpiled your chest with a rich variety of unrelated details, however, you will be amazed to see how naturally they pop up when the need arises, full of life and ready to be fit into the narrative.
So what sorts of details am I talking about?
Let me think. Okay, let’s say you know someone who for no apparent reason starts sneezing when they get really angry. Once the sneezing fit begins, it goes on and on. Now, I don’t know anyone like that, but for the sake of argument, let’s say you do. What, you wonder, explains this pattern? One approach would be to try to come up with a tentative theory—physiological, perhaps, or psychological—to analyze their behavior. My brain, however, doesn’t work that way. I think, “Wow, people like that exist,” and leave it at that. Instead of drawing an inference, I take it as an example of the variety of things in the world, filing it away as an undifferentiated lump. The drawers of my mental chest are full of disjointed memories of this sort that I have collected and stored.
James Joyce put it most succinctly when he said, “Imagination is memory.” I tend to agree with him. In fact, I think he was spot-on. What we call the imagination consists of fragments of memory that lack any clear connection with one another. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, but when we bring such fragments together our intuition is sparked, and we sense what the future may hold in store. It is from their interaction that a novel’s true power emanates.
We are—or at least I am—equipped with this expansive mental chest of drawers. Each drawer is packed with memories, or information. There are big drawers and small ones. A few have secret compartments, where information can be hidden. When I am writing, I can open them, extract the material I need, and add it to my story. Their numbers are countless, but when I am focused on my writing I know without thinking exactly which drawer holds what and can immediately put my hands on what I am looking for. Memories I could never recall otherwise come naturally to me. It’s a great feeling to enter into this elastic, unrestrained state, as if my imagination had pulled free from my thinking mind to function as an autonomous, independent entity. Needless to say, for a novelist like me the information stored in my chest is a rich and irreplaceable resource.