When Stories Stop Feeling Like Stories

On memory and the narratives that shape our lives

For the past couple of years, I’ve been writing a novel with the working title Begin Again.

But recently, I’ve started questioning what I call it.

In What If the Truth Was Never the Point?, I wrote about how the novel itself seemed to be changing as I moved deeper into the second draft. Or perhaps more accurately, my understanding of it was changing.

That’s the strange thing about stories. We tend to think we are shaping them, when often they are shaping us.

A title frames meaning before we ever experience the thing itself. A book title. A job title. “Doctor,” “Officer,” or “Writer” immediately shapes the story we begin telling ourselves about a person before they ever say a single word. And of course, there are titles far more culturally and emotionally loaded than those.

Begin Again feels hopeful. Redemptive. Almost certain renewal is possible.

The Path Forward, the title that seems to be calling to me now, feels different. Less certain. More grounded in movement, choice, and uncertainty.

Objectively, they describe much the same novel. Two estranged stepbrothers hiking the Colorado Trail after a family tragedy. Grief. Memory. Regret. Reconciliation.

But emotionally, they feel like entirely different books.

In that earlier essay, I wrote about how the novel itself seemed to be telling me where it wanted to go. Writers talk about that sort of thing all the time. Characters taking on lives of their own. Fiction resisting outlines. Refusing to stay inside the neat boundaries we originally planned for it.

What I hadn’t fully realized was how much the title itself was shaping the meaning of the story, both for the reader and for me.

At first, I simply liked the sound of Begin Again.

Now I’m no longer sure that’s the story I’m telling.

Over the last two years, I’ve occasionally questioned the title, but I always returned to the same resolve not to change it. I have to laugh a little at my own unwillingness to Begin Again.

Then I realized something more interesting.

I may not be changing the novel at all.

The novel may be telling me its real name.

Stories do that.

Not just for writers.

That realization sent me down a strange rabbit hole about memory, identity, neuroscience, and the narratives human beings live inside of without even realizing it.

It made me think about something I’ve read repeatedly in neuroscience: memory is far less like replaying a recording and far more like reconstructing a narrative.

Stop reading for a moment and notice everything around you.

The sounds in the room.

The pressure of your body against the chair.

The objects nearby you hadn’t noticed until now.

A moment ago, most of that information barely existed in your awareness at all. Your mind filtered it away so you could focus on the words unfolding in front of you.

But what’s stranger is this: when you remember this moment later, your brain will not retrieve an exact replica of what happened. It will reconstruct the experience from fragments, emotion, meaning, and interpretation. According to neuroscientists like Anil Seth in Being You, perception and memory are far less like replaying reality and far more like actively reconstructing experience.

In other words, memory is not playback.

It is interpretation. A revision.

It’s storytelling.

More interesting still is the fact that the reconstruction process itself changes the memory. The simple act of remembering alters what is remembered.

Said another way, we remember stories. And like all stories, they tend to grow in the retelling.

“And the fish was this big.”

More unsettling is the realization that we often shape those stories around emotion first, then gather facts that support the emotional reality we already feel. I was reminded of Robert Wright’s book Why Buddhism Is True, where he describes the mind less as a single rational actor and more as competing modules, constantly nudging perception and behavior in ways we barely notice. We tell ourselves we are reasoning our way through life. More often, we may be narrating our emotions after the fact.

Then I thought about Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History episode “Free Brian Williams,” and the story of how Williams’ memories from Iraq slowly morphed over time. Experiences and stories he had heard from others eventually became tangled with his own memories until the line between recollection and narrative began to blur.

Gladwell also discussed a long-running study of 9/11 memories that found people’s recollections changed dramatically over time, even while they remained deeply confident those memories were accurate.

The unsettling part of all this is not that memory is imperfect. We’ve known that for a long time.

It’s realizing how much of our lives are shaped by stories we never recognize as stories at all.

Stories about ourselves.

Stories about other people.

Stories about what someone’s behavior means. What their silence means. What their expression means. What their disappointment, criticism, or distance says about them, and about us.

Stories about whether we are lovable, successful, abandoned, worthy, strong, weak, or broken.

And maybe that’s why this question about the title of my novel has lingered in my mind more than it probably should.

Because names matter.

Stories matter.

Because of my visual impairment, I cannot read a menu in a restaurant. My wife is incredibly mindful of this and, because she knows me so well, she quietly helps me figure out what I want to order. But she isn’t always with me.

More times than I care to admit, I’ve found myself staring at a menu I have little chance of reading, stumbling through an order for something I assume is on it, then fumbling through the inevitable follow-up questions.

“Did you mean—”

“The one with—”

When Marilyn hears these stories, she rightfully tells me I should simply let people know I am visually impaired. But that was hard for me for a long time, because of the story I felt it told about who I was.

Weak.

Incapable.

That wasn’t me.

Or was it?

I am a VMI graduate. A former Marine. Not the guy who couldn’t even order an egg roll.

That was the story that played in my mind for years.

Over the years, I’ve gotten better at recognizing the cognitive dissonance between the labels I place on my visual challenges and the objective reality of them. I’ve learned to see those labels for what they are: stories I tell myself.

Where this becomes far harder for me to recognize is in the stories I tell about other people. Those feel like objective truth.

And once I believe those stories deeply enough, they quietly begin shaping the way I experience everything about them. I believe I know who they are. I think I see them clearly.

But all I really see is the story.

The one I created.

The labels we place on ourselves and others quietly shape the way we experience reality. Over time, they stop feeling like stories.

They become our truth.

“He was wrong.”

“They were right.”

“I am right.”

Begin Again.

The Path Forward.

My essays are now available both here and on Substack, so you can read them wherever you prefer. If you haven’t checked out Substack, I highly recommend it. There’s a lot of great free content there from other writers as well.

You can find my Substack here:https://writing.chrismonnette.com 

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