I used to be a huge pro wrestling fan. It was something I watched on TV every week with my father — Saturday nights were for TBS: Knight Rider, The A-Team, and then NWA/WCW wrestling. I stayed interested in it all through college, up until the final WCW Nitro — the one where it was “revealed” that the McMahons had bought WCW. I even used to cover indie wrestling organizations for a decently well-known pro wrestling website, and take photos for one of the federations in Florida, where I lived at the time. 

I always preferred WCW to WWF/WWE, probably because it was what I started with, and also because that was the show I watched with my father; WWF was on Saturday and Sunday mornings where I lived growing up, and I generally watched those on my own. One thing we didn’t do, however, was purchase pay-per-view events. 

So when WCW aired Clash of the Champions on a weeknight on TBS, of course we sat down to watch it. It was like a free pay-per-view! 

The first Clash of the Champions was headlined by Ric Flair vs. Sting. I remember it being a well-told story in wrestling match form, with lots of back-and-forth. What I didn’t remember, though, was that it ended in a time-limit draw. 

Last year, when I wrote the first GWWA novel (yes, there will be more than one), I cast back my memory to that first Clash and wrote that the match didn’t have any run-ins, because I didn’t remember them. But when I went back to edit the book last month, I double-checked my research and it turned out that there were run-ins on both sides. I don’t want to say that besmirched my memory of the event, but it definitely made me change the story on the page. I wanted a match where the heel won clean (and, because it was a draw, Flair technically won that match), so I had to do some digging. Eventually I went with the Kurt Angle vs. Shawn Michaels match at Wrestlemania; I feel like that one is well-known enough to wrestling fans that I can reference it and they’ll get it, and I put in enough context around it in the book for non-fans to understand as well. 

This is why, when I rely on my memory during the writing process, I always put a note in [square brackets] — my memory has never been what you’d call particularly good; I’m quite forgetful in general. At least with the [square brackets] I can run a find command on the left-square-bracket character and make sure I don’t miss any notes to myself. (I also tend to put the more important notes in ALL CAPS, just in case.) It’s not always research items, either; sometimes I just forget what color someone’s eyes are and have to go back to the character sheet, but I don’t want to do that right at that moment and lose my writing mojo. Once I’m going, I like to keep going until I can’t go anymore. If that means I can’t rely fully on my own memories of things, then so be it. I’ll fix it later.