What a Childhood Game Taught Me About Identity, Literature, and the Limits of Categories
When I was a child, we used to play a game called Thinking of Categories. The game moved to a rhythmic pattern of clapping. One of us would call out a category: animals, countries, fruits, famous people. Everyone else had to take their turn naming something that belonged before the rhythm passed them by.
It was a game of memory and quick association. But I think that this children’s game reveals a deep truth about how we survive complexity, and one of them is by placing things under titles, by sorting them through labels. Interestingly, this is the very same function of today’s hashtags.
Thinking of Hashtags Now
A hashtag is a digital category. A word placed after the # symbol gathers thousands, even millions, of separate experiences into a shared space where people can find related stories and conversations. Like the categories of our childhood game, hashtags organize information into patterns, communities, and shared interests. They make the overwhelming scale of the internet navigable.
But more than organizing, categories and hashtags shape perception. A book categorized as memoir is read differently from one categorized as fiction. A person marked with #immigrant, #teacher, #entrepreneur, or #activist is approached through assumptions attached to those labels. In this way, categories become boxes, and boxes become boundaries.
The Problem with Boundaries and Boxes
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas reminds us that a person can never be fully captured by our concepts. For Levinas, the “Other” always exceeds our understanding,
“the face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me.”(1)
As writers, we ought to be wary of our instinct to classify. We may believe we have understood someone and are wont to describe them with precise, well-observed details. We imagine our characters, often beginning with labels: the villain, the hero, the mentor, the rebel, the victim, the lover, the outsider. Yet even our most careful categories fail to capture the entirety of a person. Any hashtag we assign becomes a box that will always overflow.
Readers recognize stereotypes when characters remain trapped inside their labels. Compelling characters exceed them. A villain may love poetry, a hero may act selfishly, a parent may behave like a child, an outcast may become a leader, and a generous friend may carry private resentments. These contradictions are what give life to literature.
Character development does not simply fit a person into a category; it reveals why no category is sufficient. The most memorable characters are those who continually escape our attempts to define them. We may name them as the tragic prince, the fallen king, the proud woman, the idealist, but then they will resist containment. Hamlet is indecisive but he is reflective, cruel, tender, and self-divided. King Lear, the tyrant, is also a grieving father undone by his own blindness. The witty Elizabeth Bennet is capable of misjudgment. Jay Gatsby, so often reduced to the dreamer, had a lot of illusions and deep longing. And Clarissa Dalloway, who moves through an ordinary ritual of a single day, reveals a whole life of regret, desire, and reckoning that cannot be contained by the day-role she appears to play.
These characters exceed the roles their creators assigned them. What we remember is not a fixed label, but the ways they complicate, contradict, and finally escape the names given to them.
The Greater Challenge of Memoir
If fiction is the craft of creating complex dimensions, memoir is the courage to tell the truth about them. In a novel, we may invent contradictions. In memoir, we must recognize them in real life, and this is often more difficult.
As writers, we may be tempted to simplify, to cast people as heroes or villains, helpers or obstacles, victims or perpetrators. We want to create clean narratives. But life is rarely clean.
To write memoir with integrity, we must be willing to portray people in their full complexity rather than reducing them to roles in our personal story. We must be brave enough to acknowledge ambiguity, to revisit painful memories without simplifying them, and to reveal our own contradictions. But how do we refuse caricature in writing the memoir to allow each person their full humanity?
Writing Beyond Labels
In the game Thinking of Categories, success depended on how quickly we could place things into categories. Recall had to be immediate, almost instinctive. But writing a memory moves differently. Fragments invite pauses. We do not run at the speed of random thought when we write memoir. More often, we move in circles: in discovery and rediscovery, in inquiry and further investigation.
Within these concentric movements, and through many detours, we begin to notice everything that does not fit. We cannot remain indifferent, for as writers we are called to stay curious, even when things exceed our understanding. And then comes the harder task: to name and to unname, to include what serves the truth of the work, and to leave out what, though true, cannot find its place within the pattern we are shaping.
Even so, we do not abandon categories altogether. We still need them. Libraries depend on labels, and search engines crawl through hashtags. But whether we write fiction or memoir, our task is not to remain confined within the labels we assign, but to reveal the humanity that overflows them.
Writing Beyond the Labels of Love
One of the most challenging aspects of writing a memoir is describing a significant other. Whether it is a spouse, a partner, a former lover, or someone who once stood at the center of our world, we often find ourselves caught between affection and annoyance, between tenderness and pain. Do we cast them as hero or villain? Do they become a soulmate or a heartbreaker?
In memory, their roles can feel fixed, as though they have already been decided by the past. But the moment we begin to write, those roles begin to unravel before us, always incomplete. Our struggle becomes more than recounting what happened; it becomes the work of telling the truth of a person who was never only one thing. As Emmanuel Levinas reminds us, “the Other cannot be reduced to the same.”(1)
This is where our writing becomes both an investigation and a decision. To write a memoir is to sit with contradictions, to hold affection and hurt in the same space without forcing resolution. We look again and again, questioning what we once thought we understood, and in doing so, we open space for the complexity of a person we believed we knew.
What happens when you go back to a memory you thought you already understood, and it suddenly feels unclear? Do you start changing the way you tell it, or do you pause and ask why it feels different now? When you write about a person, do they begin to sound better than they were, or worse? And what do you do with the details you know are true, but don’t quite fit the story you want to tell?
When love and hurt show up in the same memory, what do you keep on the page? Do you soften one to make the other easier to read? When you find yourself stuck writing about a person, is it because you don’t know what happened, or because you’re not yet ready to be fully honest? And if you told it more truthfully, would it still fit the story you’re trying to shape?
If these tensions feel familiar, maybe it’s worth taking a closer look. In the WordFellow Shop, we take time to work through memory, relationships, and character with care. We learn how to write about people without putting them into boxes. Together, we practice writing others as they are full, changing, and not easy to define.
You join us, learn more, and save your spot here: https://www.ninangjatwordhouse.com/creative-writing-wordfellow-shop-2
Endnotes
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- Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), originally published 1961.
