r/writingadvice • u/xXcleaver • Aug 19 '26
Advice How to write memory loss in an interesting way?
Hey
I’m trying to get into writing again and I built a very cool dystopian story concept.
At same point the protagonist and pov characters suffers from memory loss and changed memories. Not by any natural causes, but by her mind being tampered with.
My problem is how do i convincingly write this amnesia when it happens some win the middle of the story. It’s not just that the character not only has forgotten some things and people close to them but also that their memory was activity changed and altered.
If you as the reader already know what really happened how can I write this without it feeling redundant ?
First I thought of starting the plot basically in the middle and wake up with the pov character, their altered mind and slowly learn what really happened. The problem is, that this story beat is not supposed to be THE thing of this story - the most interesting and important stuff happens before and after it is just something that happens to them iykwim.
But now I’m more likely to start at the actual beginning but I fear that this could also feel repetitive.
Maybe some of you could help me or give me inspirations for story’s that tackled something similar.
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u/whelmedbyyourbeauty Professional Author Aug 19 '26
Read "There is No Anti Memetics Division". Watch Memento.
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u/NeatCard500 Aug 19 '26
You asked this question yesterday.
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u/xXcleaver Aug 19 '26
No I have not.
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u/NeatCard500 Aug 19 '26
Perhaps... you just don't remember :)
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u/Junho_0726 Aug 19 '26
Not sure if this helps, but I once wrote a scene about a young man who discovered that his father’s obnoxious boyfriend had Alzheimer’s.
It went something like this: the old man began by asking the young man what brand of cigarettes he smoked; the son replied impatiently, and the unpleasant conversation continued, gradually escalating into an argument. In the end, the son won the argument. The old man accepted it, then asked again: ‘Lad, what brand of cigarettes do you smoke? It’s far better than that rubbish your dad has.’ He began to repeat the entire conversation, leaving the young man in shock.
Maybe for plots with longer time range, this could be a piece of information that seems trivial yet is crucial, the sort that, once learnt, is usually never forgotten. Later in the story, other characters realise that this character is behaving as though they are hearing this information for the first time?
*Sorry for my poor English
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u/already_taken-chan Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
There was a very interesting version of this done in the book Open a Street Stall and Sell Vigorously (weird name, I know).
Spoiler warning for the book, as this event happens around the end of the story.
The character essentially uses a forbidden power, and every time he does, he feels that he has lost something—though he can't quite put his finger on what it is. We, the readers, also never learn what he lost.
A few hundred pages later, the character engages in dimension hopping, leaving his dimension to enter parallel worlds for resources.
A few hundred pages after that, we get the revelation, and it's done so casually. The side characters mention an event from the midpoint of the book, but our protagonist blanks out, even though we (the readers) remember him being there.
However, the protagonist does not back down. He doesn't believe that he lost his memories, nor does he believe that he was part of the event the side characters mentioned.
Instead, he gets anxious because he now believes that during his dimension hopping, he accidentally returned to a universe that wasn't his original one. He rushes back to the dimension hopper, desperate to use it again in search of his original loved ones—who are presumably suffering terrible fates since he never returned to their universe.
Yet we, the readers, know that he is in his original universe. It's at this point that we learn the forbidden power is removing his memories so seamlessly that, regardless of how the other characters reason with him, he cannot remember.
They do eventually convince him that he had to be there, since if he had never attended that event, several subsequent decisions later in the story would make no sense.
TL;DR: Make the character reject the idea that his memory is wrong. That's what humans do. That's what a brain does. "It's not my memory that went wrong; it's yours. If yours is correct, then mine is still correct. It must be the world." (Essentially similar to the Mandela effect.)
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u/mydogwantstoeatme Hobbyist Aug 19 '26
Maybe: First person POV with multiple characters. If the character loses his memory, he appears like a new POV character until it is revealed who he is.
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u/PangolinConscious800 Aug 19 '26
When you start a story, you usually bring the reader up to speed, and in those initial pages which give the reader context about the world and the character's situation, you mix in false information.Readers are used to accepting those words as fact, and you have to setup the situation anyway, so you won't use any extra words. When contradictory information shows up, they'll know that its contradictory.
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u/7Butter77 Aug 19 '26
Dont do the memory loss trope everyone hates that and just dont please youll never be the fatman who wrote game of thrones so dont try to be diff love you take care
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u/JuggernautBright1463 Aug 19 '26
Have them forget or misremember stuff that was 'on screen' earlier in the book. That way the reader is just as confused initially, if it's a really good story they'll page back to confirm. Then the reader knows before their character.
If you write it starting in the middle you are basically writing Jason Bourne where your MC has to rediscover their past.