My family of Boomers and Millennials is just concluding a week-long reunion. We have matured and ripened over the years so this recent gathering was rife with laughter and devoid of the tensions from gatherings in the past. The twenty-and-thirty-something cousins all get along now, respecting each other’s differences, and embracing each other’s partners, and my sisters and I have never been closer. I’m happy to have left behind the sniping, brooding days of yore.

A big source of laughter over the past week has been the repetition of old family memes, as well as the spinning of new memes. How quickly we seize on a word or a phrase that sums up our shared experience, sometimes fraught, sometimes humorous. Mill-enn-i-als became one of our new memes when we were discussing “geriatric millennials,” a phrase recently coined by the media. My text-to-speech device pronounced the word millennials with a long I, stressing the third syllable so the word rhymed with vials. Hearing that, we were off and running, using the word whenever we could to generate gales of laughter. Another meme arose when I said that I would welcome gifts of “adult bibs” to catch the drooling brought on by my ALS. Immediate riffing ensued. Adult bibs? Did that mean I wanted pornography? Exactly what images did I want on those bibs?

The coining of memes has always been a feature of our family life. It has been a feature in the life of every family I’ve ever gotten to know. Memes have also figured prominently in all of my significant relationships, both romantic and platonic. They serve to solidify our connections. They remind us of what we’ve endured together, good and bad, making us laugh and cringe, and identifying us as belonging to a tribe.  

This past week our meme-making was partly directed to initiating some new partners into our family group. In creating memes with the new members, we were bringing them into the fold. As we explained some of the existing memes, we were sharing important and intimate information about how we operate, what we value, what we find funny, how we regard the culture at large. Memes are abbreviations that, while brief, are freighted with meaning.

Memes are an oft-ignored but very useful tool for fiction writers in elucidating character. In inventing memes for a character, you examine a character’s past experiences in her family, or in her relationship. You discover her attitudes toward those experiences. You learn about what she has in common with her family or her partner. You learn about her values and those of the people who surround her. You understand how she has bonded with family or partner as a way of defining her difference from the rest of the world.

An example of a revealing meme from my family of origin is the phrase: Make the most! Every day when my sisters and I left for school, my mother would call out those words to us: Make the most! It was short for: Make the most of your opportunities, a phrase that was said to her by her father when she went to school. My sisters and I knew well what those three words meant. They meant that our mother was behind us all the way, but they also meant that she cared—perhaps too much—that we achieve things.

A relationship meme between me and my husband stems from the time we visited a garden store and the clerk warned us that the mint we were buying was “evasive” (meaning “invasive”). We are both writers, word people, and we found this misuse hysterical. We now refer to any invasive plant as evasive, which, embarrassingly, reveals us to be linguistic snobs.  

Some of my favorite memes fall into the category of call-and-response such as my ex-husband and I practiced every morning when he brought me coffee in bed. That Percival?, I would say. That Percival, he said. Where’s critter? I would ask. She’s in critter heaven, he responded. This went on for a few more lines until I said, Dat coffee? And he would say, Dat coffee. Dat yummy? I would ask. Dat yummy, he would confirm. With that call-and-response concluded, our day would get underway. The origins of all the elements of that sequence are too complicated to parse here as it grew out of several situations, but the last part came from a trip to Hawaii with my niece who was then a toddler. We would go out to the beach every morning with mugs of coffee. She would look up at me and say, “Dat coffee?” “Yes!” I would say. “Dat yummy?” she would ask. “Yes!” A trivial cute-baby story perhaps, but one that to this day speaks of that young woman’s profound curiosity about the world. We all now say it, thinking of her, thinking of that trip, thinking of how much we all enjoy a good cup of coffee. So many different meanings can be packed into a single meme.

Not all memes are fond and funny; some are cringe-inducing. Blueberries Eventually is a meme that sums up an embarrassing memory from the time that my then-boyfriend and I announced our engagement to all four of our parents. My boyfriend’s mother, an observant, no-nonsense woman who sensed my ambivalence, regarded me with her characteristic penetrating gaze. “When do you plan to marry?” she asked. A perfectly legitimate question for which I had no answer. “Eventually,” I said, and she seemed to know, as everyone else also sensed, that I really meant never. The dessert my mother had made that night was dubbed “Blueberries Eventually” in a desperate attempt to paper over my embarrassing revelation with humor. I never did marry that man (he is now married to a man), but we remain the best of friends.

With any meme there are “insiders” and “outsiders”—those who “get” the meme and those who don’t. Exploring this insider/outsider idea can be another interesting way to deploy memes while building story and character. Perhaps the kids in a family share memes that the parents don’t understand, or vice versa. I can’t imagine a family or relationship in which no memes exist—that would, I think, be the definition of dysfunction, no bonding at all. Perhaps a character leaves a marriage when she realizes she and her husband have no shared memes?

Some memes for your fictional characters will be immediately clear to the reader. Others may feel somewhat mysterious, but their impact will still be felt. In devising memes, experiment with how much must be explained and what can be left to the reader to figure out. If memes are slow to come to you in terms of your character, probe your own catalogued history of relationship and family memes and modify them to suit your character. This is an arena for riffing and play. Get silly, have fun, and know, in deepening character, you’re doing the serious work of creating fiction!