Nature Future Conditional

The story behind the story: The Memory Ward

This week, Futures is pleased to welcome Wendy Nikel with her story The Memory Ward. You can find out more about Wendy’s writing at her website or by following her on Twitter. Here, she kindly reveals the twists and turns that led to her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing The Memory Ward

The Memory Ward is a product of the Codex Writers’ Group’s annual flash-fiction contest. It was my first time participating, and I am very grateful to the community for reading my work and sharing their feedback.

This particular round, the prompt was a list of words from which we were supposed to choose three. I selected ‘fragrant’, ‘bubble’ and ‘stole’, which — as you can tell — have little connection to the final story. My initial concept was about a character who literally saves time in a bottle and what happens when one of those fragrant, bubbly bits of time is stolen. Other alternate versions included scratch-and-sniff stickers that invoke memories, and memories worn as beads around the characters’ necks. Eventually, through, those ideas warped into what you find in this story: a tale of lifelong friends and the question of what memories we’d choose to remember or forget, if given the choice.

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