How should I handle amnesia-based plot threads? (interesting vs cliché)
I'm writing for an amnesiac protagonist, in spite of the fact that I feel amnesia in fiction is usually a bad cliché used to avoid some of the background work of creating a character's family, friends, hometown, career, etc. Ideally, I'd like to hear an answer from someone who has written an amnesiac character before, and struggled with this same "interesting vs cliché" problem. How do you make the character's amnesia something interesting and engaging for your audience? How do you avoid making your audience groan? What kind of problems do you throw at your heroes? I'm more interested in plot considerations than character considerations. Examples of successful properties are appreciated.
Why I'm using amnesia: My big bad has used magic to (accidentally) cause the amnesia in the protagonist and his allies, and that's what causes them to become involved. I intend for all of the amnesiacs to have fully realized histories that may or may not come up down the road, but I don't have those histories created yet.
On realism and offense: This is magically-induced retrograde amnesia according to the typical trope - the characters might remember their names, they remember how the world works and retain their physical skills, but they don't remember their past. (They may recover it over time, but may not) I am not overly concerned with medical accuracy - this is magic, after all. I am aware that amnesia is a real problem that real people have to deal with, but this story is not about that, and is more aimed at entertainment than education. I do not intend to offend anyone - I'm just not aiming for that kind of depth here.
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The challenge of the day is to rename your magical process as 'memory erasing' and the person affected as 'memory cleansed' or 'memoryless' (or variations thereof). No more worries about amnesia, especially if you don't want to provide any realism, nor portray it to any degree of accuracy.
As a side note, an Italian friend once mentioned that in Italian there is a distinction between two kinds of forgetting: from the mind and from the heart. My knowledge of English does not get far enough that I can say whether such a nuance exists. However, for reference: dimenticare (from the mind) and scordare (from the heart). Perhaps you can find an inspiration for a good magical terminology that can discern between forgetting the (recent) past, but not being oblivious to one's own physical skills.
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I thought both The Bourne Identity and the beginning of the TV Series Blindspot did a decent job with amnesiac MCs.
In both cases, the MC was obviously worried about their lack of memory, but also not much interested in the "hero" route at all, they didn't know how they got their skills (in Blindspot I think she didn't know she had skills until she was attacked), which were good guys and which were bad. They did not know which side they were on, or if they were good guys or bad guys.
The lack of knowledge about their own ideology, the failure to know anybody including loved ones, basically removes their motivation to be a hero; though I think you could include a natural inclination toward altruism: I will stop to help a complete stranger in distress. So write as if everybody is a complete stranger to the amnesiac, and not one of them is fully trusted.
Amnesiac stories done right get driven by outside actors, attacks by enemies that know who they are (and perhaps fear them), or actors that believe the amnesiac knows a secret (which they have forgotten but their former self does know), or people that believe if anybody finds the amnesiac then they (the attacker) will be in trouble. Or somebody comes to the hero for help and finds an amnesiac, so they help the hero, that doesn't know or trust them. You find the amnesiac reacting by muscle memory (which is not lost) and instincts and their own base inclinations.
As for recovering memory, I'd avoid "convenient" recovery; I would expect a real amnesiac to first recover the memories most important to them, the ones that (IRL) have a lot of physical associations, actual neural pathways laid down in their brain. The people they live with, interact with, love, hate, etc. The things they know and use every day, the pathways and places they know and use every day. Think of these as similar to muscle-memory and instinct. Along with traumatic memories (which burn in fast), They would be recalled first, and probably the most recent non-traumatic memories would be recalled very late, or more realistically not at all (because short-term memory since the last sleep period, or even in the last week, can be lost forever IRL amnesia. e.g. many people in car accidents have "last memories" 20 or 30 minutes before the accident, and may recall one or two traumatic images right after the accident, but zero in-between.)
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