Stories with experience
Mental Fiction is fiction whose main movement takes place within the lived experience and thought of one or more characters. It explores how people notice, feel, remember, imagine, interpret and choose, and how these inner processes shape their actions and relationships.
The world around the characters remains important. An event, a conversation or a silence may start the movement of a story. Its course unfolds through what that experience means to those involved: what they understand, what they miss, what they resist, and what they come to question.
I use the name Mental Fiction to describe this focus in my writing. My aim is to give readers an experience that invites reflection, while leaving them free to find meanings I may not have intended.
What moves the story?
A person encounters something. They bring their past experience, hopes, fears and habits to it. They notice some things and overlook others. They form an understanding, perhaps act on it, and meet the consequences.
That movement can be quiet but far-reaching. A small act of trust may disturb an old assumption. A remark may be heard as kindness by one person and dismissal by another. Someone may discover that the question troubling them differs from the one they have been trying to answer.
Thought is part of this movement, together with feeling, bodily sensation, memory and imagination. People rarely experience these as separate activities. A tight chest, a remembered voice and an uncertain hope can all enter the same moment of choice.
A change of mind can be a turning point. So can a failure to listen, a decision to wait, or the discovery that a familiar answer no longer holds. Insight may be partial. A character may remain mistaken, avoid a difficult truth or find a way to live with an unanswered question.
Minds meet—and miss one another
Although much of the movement lies within people’s experience, relationships are central to Mental Fiction.
We cannot directly know another person’s inner life. We work from their words, actions, silences and expressions, interpreting them through our own experience. Sometimes we understand one another well. Sometimes we build confident accounts from very little evidence.
A story can let the reader glimpse the gap between what one person means and what another hears. It can also show how an understanding grows through attention, questions and shared experience.
The threads of a story may briefly cross without coming together. An encounter that one person soon forgets may remain important to someone else.
An invitation to you, the reader
I hope you will become involved in the characters’ lives and find yourself thinking alongside them.
You may recognise a familiar response, question a choice, or see something a character cannot yet see. You may understand a character’s reasons while disagreeing with what they do.
The invitation to reflect need not interrupt the story. It may come afterwards, when an exchange returns to mind or an ordinary event takes on a different meaning.
There is no required conclusion. Your experience may lead you towards a reading quite different from mine. That is part of what interests me in sharing the stories.
How it relates to other fiction
Mental Fiction shares ground with several established kinds of writing. These are differences of emphasis, and a story can belong to more than one.
Psychological fiction
Psychological fiction explores motives, feelings, mental life and relationships. It has a broad scope and is not confined to mental illness, distress or unusual states of mind.
Mental Fiction overlaps strongly with it. The emphasis I want to name is the unfolding process of experience: how an event becomes meaningful to someone, how their understanding develops, and how that enters their choices. I also place particular value on the reflection this may invite in the reader.
Literary fiction
Much literary fiction attends closely to inner experience, ambiguity, relationships and language. Mental Fiction can use those same resources.
The term describes the focus of a story rather than a claim about its literary standing. It can be written in plain language and follow a clear sequence of events while still exploring a complex experience.
Philosophical fiction and fiction of ideas
Philosophical fiction often explores questions about knowledge, values, identity or how to live. Those questions may also matter deeply in Mental Fiction.
My interest is in how such questions are lived by particular people. An idea gains weight through what someone hopes for, fears losing or needs to decide. Characters have lives beyond the views they express, and those lives may complicate their beliefs.
Stream of consciousness and interior monologue
These are ways of presenting thought and experience. They can bring a reader close to the movement of a character’s mind.
Mental Fiction does not depend on either technique. Inner experience can also emerge through dialogue, action, remembered events, physical detail and what a person leaves unsaid. A story may follow one viewpoint or move between several.
Parables and moral tales
Parables often use a compact situation to open a question about conduct, values or understanding. Some invite a clear lesson; others leave readers with something less settled.
A parable can also be Mental Fiction when its force lies in how people perceive, interpret and respond to what happens. In my own parables, I am interested in giving readers room to consider the situation and their response to it.
Stories driven by outward action
In some stories, the main question is what will happen next: whether someone will escape, solve a mystery, achieve an aim or overcome an obstacle.
Mental Fiction can contain all of these events. Its centre of interest lies in how they are experienced and understood. Outward action and inner movement can strengthen one another: a choice changes events, and its consequences change what the person believes is possible.
Mental Fiction on Stories That Matter
In Key to the Flat, a small encounter opens questions about trust in everyday life.
In Alex and Fear of AI, fears about a changing world enter people’s work, relationships and sense of the future. Listening and discussion become part of how those fears are understood and lived with.
Other stories may take this focus into different settings and forms. Greywoods provides a shared fictional place, but Mental Fiction can unfold wherever people experience something that matters to them.
You can browse All stories, explore Categories, or use the Index to find a subject that interests you.
If a story leaves you with a thought or question, I would welcome it. You can comment beneath the story or send a private response through Story feedback.