What fiction is

Most of what we experience in a day never gets recorded in memory. We only record experiences that are salient or novel. If the brain knows how to process an experience, there’s no need to notice anything.

Unusual requests have no SOP and get bumped up to the supervisor for review.

By this afternoon I will have forgotten what I ate for breakfast. But if I eat something new, I might hold that memory for a few days or weeks.

Let’s say this morning I ate croissant toast for the first time. I would remember that experience vividly at first, then, as I repeat the experience and finish the loaf, I’m likely to forget that particular event but I’ll form a stronger semantic impression of this thing called croissant toast.

When autobiographical memories are first formed, they are a jumble of episodic and semantic information. But, over time, as we experience objects and events, they get stored in semantic memory as more discrete patterns we can retrieve in isolation, like pulling a dinner plate from the cupboard.

Meanwhile, our brain is also forming episodic memories as discrete patterns. We use these patterns to predict was is happening or will happen.

A young man walks into a living room and stands next to a recliner. He looks down at the seat and picks up a pipe that was laying on a table beside the recliner. He holds the pipe with the fingers of both hands as he slowly scans the room. He sets down the pipe and walks out of the room.

You might get a sense from reading this that someone is missing from this setting. Perhaps the young man’s father has died, or his senile grandfather wasn’t in the room where he expected him. The reason you make this inference is because you’ve had similar experiences or read similar scenes in books.

You can take these episodic patterns and insert new semantic information to create something new. I can use the same pattern above but substitute a woman standing next to an empty crib, or a daughter standing in her mother’s art studio. Readers will recognize the pattern.

And that’s what we call writing fiction.

Fiction writers are basically remixing decoupled episodic and semantic information in order to create something new that readers will hopefully find is novel enough or salient enough to be worth remembering.