How Humbug Witch Teaches Writers to Harness Implicit Memory
Are you using a checklist or wielding a superpower?
There was this Witch…And all of her was little. Except her nose. That was very BIG.
~Humbug Witch by Lorna Balian
This week on our trip to the library, my three-year-old son and I perused what was left of the Halloween picture book collection. It’s been October for a while now, so the shelves were sparse.
I showed my son a book about colors and spooks. “No, Mommy,” he said, and tossed the book aside, the way preschoolers do with unwanted things. Then, my heart stopped.
Amid the dregs of unwanted Halloween books, was Humbug Witch.
The moment I saw her BIG nose, her long, stringy, red hair, and her slightly squashed, tall, black, pointed hat, I was suddenly transported back to the rented house where I spent my preschool years. I was flashed back to sitting cross-legged on on our old plaid sofa. The book in my lap. My little white dog beside me. I was wearing itchy wool tights under my brown dress (the one with the pretty blue-and-pink flowers my mother sewed for me). Primary-colored, plastic barrettes slid down my baby-fine, waist-length hair. I could practically smell the chicken paprika simmering in the slow cooker.
One glance the cover of that book viscerally brought me back to a time long past. I’d have been around the age of my little son—the very monkey who was, right at that moment, cheerfully disorganizing the library.
When I finally got a moment to myself to sit and read the book, it was an incredible experience. With each page I turned, I was two different people. My adult-self couldn’t remember the plot of the story at all. Yet, my child-self prickled with recognition as detail after detail (portrayed by both pictures and words) came back to me in a litany I seemed to know by heart.
There are certain things from our childhoods that were very important to us, and we remember well. There’s a second category of things that were very important to us, but which we’ve forgotten. This second category is called implicit memory.
My vivid, visceral experience with Humbug Witch made me wonder, how, as a writer, could I use this second category of forgotten, yet influential implicit memory to add impact to a story?
Implicit vs. Explicit Memory
Dan Siegel introduced me to the distinction between implicit and explicit memory in his book, Mindsight.
Implicit memory includes experiences that aren’t part of our conscious narrative. It encodes experiences such as sensory perception, emotion, and bodily sensation. As my encounter with Humbug Witch proved, implicit memory can be quite strong, and it has a big impact on our present-day lives.
Explicit memory encodes the experiences we consciously remember. Explicit memories form the incidents we include when we tell ourselves (or others) the story of our own lives.
Here’s a personal example of how implicit and explicit memory differ.
As a little girl, I was fascinated by witches. I loved the Dorrie the Witch series. I have a clear explicit memory of going to the library to record a book report I wrote for Dorrie and the Blue Witch. I’d won the book report contest at school, so I got to make the recording, which was then played on local radio. My parents kept the recording, and I listened to it several times growing up.
When I tell myself the story of why I love all things witchy and spooky, Dorrie the Witch is the early memory I credit for this fascination. However, I just learned that Humbug Witch was just as important, and that I read it before I ever held a Dorrie book in my hands.
And, don’t even get me started on cats and peanut butter.
In Mindsight, Siegel seeks to harness implicit and explicit memory to heal personal wounds and traumatic events. By making implicit memories explicit, we can begin to make sense of consciously-forgotten experiences and minimize the impact of difficult implicit experiences on our present wellbeing.
It’s a laudable use of understanding the roles of implicit and explicit memory. Now, as I writer, how can use the potential of implicit memory to create more impactful literary experiences?
To my delight, the answer to this question came embedded right in Humbug Witch.
It’s all in the details
As I sat reading Humbug Witch, these are the things which I mostly strongly remembered:
1. Humbug Witch’s long, stringy red hair and her good, sturdy broom
2. Humbug Witch’s magic potion (specifically that it contained peanut butter)
3. The fact that the potion made her cat sick to his tummy
4. Humbug Witch’s funny-looking black shoes with gold buckles on them, and her hand-knit, black wool shawl
These details (and, in fact, every sentence of the story) are rich in sensory detail. We have color, the sense of something that is sturdy in your hand, the texture of a hand-knit shawl. The magic potion (which included all kinds of zany things, from egg shells to prune pits to hair tonic to cinnamon, and, yes, peanut butter) evoke very specific flavors and smells. Her kitty’s tummy ache after sampling this brew is a bodily sensation that a young child knows well.
The details Lorna Balian chose strike two of the categories of implicit memory like a bell: sensory perception and bodily sensation. Emotion is there, too, but it’s in the pictures. The posture of the witch and her cat in the drawings—her excitement as she attempts each new witchy task, and her bemused frustration when none of them work.
But, there’s more. Lorna Balian’s clever play with implicit memory doesn’t stop here.
Repeated descriptive phrases
Balian purposely repeats the key details that define Humbug Witch as a character. We learn about each item of her outfit at the start of the book. As the book winds to a close, each specific item is revisited as it’s lovingly removed. The power of choosing specific details to identify a character—and repeating them, word-for-word and often—makes a character come alive. It also makes that character memorable. In my case, it made a character unforgettable, quite literally after decades.
This is more than hand-picking a sensory detail. She’s choosing specific, repeated phrases to lodge key character details in a reader’s brain. Even the sound of the words (that good, sturdy broom) is vital to the technique.
Knowing why the advice works
In Mindsight, Dan Siegel offers the knowledge of how our memory works to enable emotional healing. For writers, conscious use of implicit memory (sensory detail and repeated descriptive phrases) are powerful tools for engaging with our readers.
Powerful tools, but I’ve never thought about why they work.
Yes, we’ve all been told, show don’t tell. We know to evoke all the senses, making sure our readers can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the world they are vicariously inhabiting via our characters.
Yes, I’ve been given the advice that every character needs a tag, some small set of identifying characteristics that are repeatedly referenced to establish the character in the reader’s mind.
Yet, memorizing these two useful pieces of advice, and understanding why they work, are two very different different things. It’s the difference between using a checklist or wielding a superpower.