Thought associations and drifting memories
I'm listening to Kazuo Ishiguro's Nobel Prize lecture (2017), where he shares a realization he had after writing a screenplay and a novel only a year apart:
My first novel and my first TV screenplay were too similar not in subject matter but in method and style … why write a novel if it was going to offer more or less the same experience someone could get by turning on the television. How could written fiction hope to survive against the might of cinema and television if it didn't offer something unique something the other forms couldn't do?
Then he realizes, while reading Proust, feverishly in bed:
I could go from one passage to the next according to the narrator's thought associations and drifting memories. I could compose in something like the way an abstract painter might choose to place shapes and colors around the canvas. I could place a scene from two days ago right beside one from 20 years earlier and ask the reader to ponder the relationship between the two in such a way, I began to think, I might suggest the many layers of self-deception and denial that shrouded any person's view of their own self and of their past.
