On Writing Toward What Cannot Be Fully Known

A reflection on writing from memory, the limits of certainty, and the discipline of allowing unanswered questions to remain present on the page.

On Writing Toward What Cannot Be Fully Known

Writing entirely from memory often assumes clarity – that if we return to the past often enough and look at it closely enough, the story will eventually resolve itself.

Writing has taught me otherwise.

All those years ago, when I started writing ‘Echoes of Tomorrow’, I was sure I understood what I was doing. Various scenarios arose readily: fragments of conversations that had been had, locations revisited again and again. I trusted that, in time, these components would settle into a coherent story.

What I uncovered was that the work was not about solving anything. It was about sticking with what was not fully known.

Memory shifts depending on where we stand, what we have endured, survived and what we are now able to see. Writing purely from memory over those years was not just retrieving data, so much as negotiating with what happened, what was understood by all at the time, and what can be understood in all its glory now.

There were times when I felt a strong urge to tidy, to make explicit what had remained unspoken, but I never liked the way it read. The narrative lost something essential – it was less honest.

It was only when I allowed unanswered questions to remain unanswered that the book began to take shape.

This process required a particular discipline, asking me to resist finding a resolution, even though I yearned for one. Accepting that not breaking every silence was necessary.

All fiction at first seems to circle around something it can’t quite name. It’s important not to try to pin that thing down, but to write carefully so it can be acknowledged.

An act of trust is writing toward what cannot be fully known. I had to trust the reader and trust the story itself.

This slower, quieter work is the only work that has ever felt honest to me while writing.

Some stories do not ask to be solved. They ask only to be held.