Applied Narratology
Write to Deal With Life's Problems
September 22nd, 2026 / µ
Disclaimer: I am not a licensed therapist, counselor, or medical professional. The writing exercises, reflections, and advice shared in this blog post are for self-discovery, creative expression, and informational purposes only. They are intended to support your healing journey but are not a substitute for professional mental health care, diagnosis, or therapy. If you are experiencing a severe crisis or struggling deeply with your trauma, please consider reaching out to a qualified professional.
Image © Unsplash
How Can Writing Fiction Stories Help You Deal With Life’s Problems?
A Fictional Space
I have written more than once about writing on this website. I do so because I believe writing is a great way to deal with life's many problems.
However, when I say writing, I don’t mean sitting down and writing just anything. What I mean is creating a structured, intentional fictional space using Applied Narratology.
Without diving headfirst into the complexities of narratology, semantics, and linguistic psychology, the long and short of it is that applied narratology can help you gain perspective by allowing you to step back and view any situation from the outside, which in turn makes it possible for you to gain a new perspective.
By applying narratological tools (storytelling techniques) to your problem or situation, you can see things you didn’t see before; you can read your own thoughts from different angles, and then they may sound a bit different than the thoughts rumbling around in your head.
Why fiction?
Why not just write a journal?
Journaling is great. Just the act of sitting down and focusing on writing relaxes you and gives you new perspectives. But fiction takes it one step further. It lets you step away from yourself and the limitations of your current reality to play with facts, events, people, and feelings.
In a journal, you will (most likely) write about what is happening to you and around you; you are still bound by reality. You are still yourself, limited by reality. You may even trap yourself in constantly writing about how things are and about things that happened in the past.
Taking the fictional step releases you from the time and place you were, e.g., hurt, and transports you to a new place: the top of the hill from where you can see everything anew. This position frees you to reconsider and reflect on your thoughts, feelings, and facts, and rewrite everything into a new coherent story.
Image © Unsplash
Let’s Bake a Story!
Writing like this is a bit like baking a cake. You are in the kitchen, your hilltop. The events, people, feelings, and facts are the ingredients you choose, mix, and put in the oven. Then you let it bake until it has the perfect consistency. It is still the same ingredients, but the oven turns them into a coherent and easily digestible cake, just as your writing can turn facts, events, and feelings into stories that are much more digestible for your emotional self than the reality you lived through.
One at a time, your cake ingredients won’t give you a great culinary experience. Together, and left to bake in the oven, they become easily digestible, and they might even taste great.
It is the same with applied narratology. When you turn your lived experience into fiction, you get a cohesive whole – your cake – instead of hundreds of events, people, situations, and feelings, each of which, one by one, may only lead to frustration because you just can’t get your head around it all. But together, mixed and matched, and baked, the mix can help you understand and gain a new perspective.
Your fiction story is your cake – a mixed, stirred, and baked blend of your lived experience now emotionally digestible.
Applied narratology is not about lying to yourself or changing the past - until someone gets their act together and invents a time machine, that is not an option. What it is about is creating a private fictional space where you can explore your feelings, opinions, and events; play around with your perception of others; hear yourself; listen to yourself. It is a safe space to explore and examine what you have experienced. It is a way to work through lived experience until everything is “digestible”.
Reality is still reality, the past is still the past, and the facts are still the facts, but in your private safe space you have created a perspective on reality, the past, and the facts that allows you to see the situation as that of an omnipotent creator rather than an isolated person left behind with a market basket full of ingredients.
Nothing can change the past, but you can change how you see it.
My continuing story, The Justified, is not an account of events as they happened in real life; it is a fictional story based on facts and past events. The characters are not real people, but they are based on real people – mixed, stirred, and baked in my oven-imagination. I apply my narratological tools to turn lived experiences into A FICTIONAL TRUTH.
Applied narratology is not escapism; it is not lulling yourself into a fantasy world to change a past that can never be changed; it is a tool to examine and explore your feelings, emotions, events, constellations, and maybe have fun going nuts and ridiculing people you hate on paper.
You too can do this, even if your problems are not of an existential or life-threatening nature. It is not about the scope of the problem or situation; it is about examining how you feel, gaining new perspective, and a clear understanding of what is going on in your life.
Image © Unsplash
ALL IS FAIR IN LOVE AND FICTION
There’s a lot of freedom in writing fictional stories for yourself. As long as you keep them private and offline, you can mix and match, hate and trash, and make fun of others and yourself as you please. It’s a safe space to let all your emotions run wild. And if that doesn’t help you, you can always bake a cake and eat it.
Want to read more about applied narratology, fictional truths, and writing? Follow me on Pinterest, where I pin my new blog posts.
Thanks for reading. If you found it valuable and worth your time, please consider supporting the blog on Ko-Fi. Until next time, remember to get your facts straight!
µ
If you liked this post, you may also like:
Find this post in: