Writing is another form of remembering

What we remember is not a perfect copy of the past. The mind erases some details, enlarges others and fills gaps with present emotion. Writing the past is therefore not record keeping but revisiting an altered landscape. Years later, we write not only what happened but how the years between changed us.

THE LANGUAGE OF LOSS. Some things cannot be spoken, yet a path can be found through writing. Lâl was born from that place for me: the need to give sentences the weight that ordinary language could not carry. Writing does not return what was lost, but gives it form and creates a space where a person can hear their own silence.

REALITY AND FICTION. A memory does not remain unchanged when it enters fiction. It divides between characters; time and place transform. Yet emotional truth may become more visible. The writer does not imitate events, but searches for their meaning. Fiction need not betray reality; sometimes it says through another story what reality could not say directly.

Most moments we believe we remember have been rewritten many times. We do not store an event as it was first lived, but as it appeared the last time we thought about it. With every telling, some details sharpen, others quietly disappear and today's emotions settle into the empty spaces. Writing does not stop this change; it makes it visible. When I turn a memory into a sentence, the person I was and the person looking back today meet on the same page. The distance between them can form a story more powerful than the event itself. The imperfection of memory becomes material for literature.

Finishing some texts does not resolve the past. Writing may even reopen a door we thought had been closed. The value of this encounter, however, is not in reaching a final answer. Seeing an unnamed feeling on the page reduces its invisible power over us. Lâl was a record of farewell for me, but once published it stopped being only my farewell and became a space where readers could touch their own losses. Writing cannot bring the past back. It can help us choose the voice with which that past continues to live inside us.

A completed text travels not only to the reader but back to the writer. Between sentences we recognise fears, longings and the stories we tell ourselves. Writing is not passive remembering. It is negotiating with the past, asking it new questions and sometimes creating enough distance that it can no longer govern us.

For this reason, even a text born from autobiography is not identical to reality. When a real person becomes a fictional character, they begin to move according to the needs of the text rather than the course of their life. The writer walks a difficult line between loyalty and freedom. The weight of what happened must be protected while being transformed into a structure another person can enter. A memory that belongs only to me remains closed to the reader; it opens into literature when it touches a shared emotion. The universal does not emerge by erasing detail but by finding the human condition within it.

Writing has another responsibility toward memory: not inventing certainty to replace what has been forgotten. Gaps are uncomfortable and the mind wants to complete them, while the writer must sometimes leave them open. The sentence 'I do not remember' can be an act of honesty rather than narrative weakness. Some pasts arrive only in fragments: the sound of a door, the colour of a room, an unfinished sentence. Forcing these fragments into a perfect chronology may make experience understandable while reducing its truth. Literature does not have to solve uncertainty; it can give uncertainty a form we can endure. When I write, I try not to fix the past like a court record, but to preserve the vibration it leaves in me today. Sometimes the most truthful account of a memory is one that also hands its central absence to the reader.