The Emotional Logic of Forgetting
A Field Guide to Narrative Craft, Principle #2: Mystery is a Function of Memory
This essay is part of “A Field Guide to Narrative Craft,” a ten-part series published irregularly and aimed at writers who want to think more deeply—and more precisely—about how stories work. Each entry explores a single principle of effective narrative, drawing from literature, theory, and lived experience to offer practical, thoughtful guidance for writing with greater intentionality and emotional force. — KM
Listen: I don’t trust narrators.
Not because I think they’re lying (though many are), but because I know how memory works. Or more precisely, how it doesn’t.
When we recall a moment, we don’t pluck it from a tidy archive. We reconstruct it, filling in blanks, compressing timelines, swapping in new details to make sense of the past from the vantage point of the present. Our memories are more like stories than files—shaped by emotion, edited by need, distorted by the pressure of coherence.
And even then, the reconstruction isn’t neutral—it’s shaped by what the moment now means to us. We remember in light of what we’ve since come to believe. We add details, not always to deceive, but to make the story feel real—to ourselves and to others. We edit the past to align with the narrative we’ve built around it. In that sense, memory is more than just recall—it’s authorship. Memory is your mind retelling a story that it can live with.
Which is why the most compelling stories often withhold information not arbitrarily, but authentically. They don’t hide answers—they reveal the structure of forgetting.
In real life, what we remember—and what we forget—is the story.
When you read a narrative that works on you like a haunting, that doesn’t let you go, it’s often not because of what it reveals, but because of what it resists explaining. A missing hour. A fragment of a conversation. A key detail that won’t quite come into focus. These aren’t just techniques—they’re acts of psychological realism. Our lives don’t unfold like perfectly linear puzzles. They accumulate, they fracture, they recur.
The best writers know this. They write mystery not as a genre but as a phenomenon. Not as “whodunit” but as “why can’t I remember?” (or, even better, “why won’t I remember?”). They tap into a deeper, more human form of suspense: the tension between what a character knows and what they’re able to face.
And that’s what keeps us turning the page—not to find out what happens next, exactly, but to see whether the character will finally admit what we’ve already begun to suspect. Whether they’ll solve the problem, recover what’s missing, or stumble into the truth they’ve spent the entire story circling around. Mystery holds us not by confusion, but by anticipation—by the hope that someone will finally say the thing no one’s been willing to say.
Which brings us to trauma. If mystery is about missing information, trauma is about the refusal of information—by the psyche, by the narrative, by the self. A character may not remember what happened, or may insist that nothing did. They may change the subject, laugh it off, or tell a version that feels just a little too rehearsed. (Or, in some cases, invent an entire extraterrestrial species that travels through the fourth dimension, collecting organisms for its interstellar zoo.)
Gaps are not plot holes. The gaps are the point.
In stories shaped by trauma—whether personal, historical, or generational—truth is often embedded in silence. The timeline bends. The past leaks into the present. Flashbacks don’t explain; they echo. A trigger appears, and a memory arrives—partial, sensory, out of sequence. It’s not just a device. It’s how people live.
So when you’re writing a story, don’t be afraid of omission. Don’t explain too early. Let memory work the way it does in life—haltingly, inaccurately, with flashes of clarity and long stretches of blur. Let your characters forget. Let them misremember. Let them protect themselves with partial truths. What they refuse to say—what they can’t yet say—may be more revealing than anything they do.
“Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.” – Toni Morrison
That kind of narrative—the kind shaped by omission, silence, and return—is not an excuse for sloppiness or vagueness. It’s an invitation to precision. A story built around psychological truth must be crafted with exquisite control. Every blank space must be deliberate. Every echo, every return, every inconsistency must feel earned. Think of it as negative space, like the silhouette of a bird formed by the gaps between leaves. What’s missing should still shape the whole.
Mystery is not about what you know and withhold—it’s about what you’re still trying to understand. And if you build it right, your reader will feel that, too.
Not confused, but compelled.
What Characters Don’t Say
Writers sometimes forget that characters, like people, don’t narrate what they already know. At least, not in full sentences. They don’t explain their own trauma to themselves in perfectly packaged exposition, and they don’t rehash their life story for their own benefit. That’s not memory—it’s monologue. And unless you’re Bill Shakespeare crafting a soliloquy or a hack writer for a soap opera, that sort of thing rings false.
Authentic internal narration works obliquely: through avoidance, through associative drift, through metaphor. What’s remembered is partial. What’s said aloud, even internally, is shaped by what the character is willing to face. That’s where mystery lives—not in what’s unknown, but in what’s known too deeply to be named.
You see this vividly in narrators like Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s A Catcher in the Rye or the unnamed speaker in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. Neither one ever sits you down to explain what’s wrong with them—because they already know, and because the knowing is too raw to name. Holden doesn’t confess that he’s grieving or unraveling. He talks about phonies and fencing and where the ducks go in winter. His narration loops and sputters and avoids, but underneath it all is an ache he never quite confronts.
Similarly, the narrator of Jesus’ Son never offers a linear account of addiction or trauma. His voice wavers between insight and haze, capturing the disorientation of memory altered by drugs, guilt, and longing. In some cases, he even recognizes that he’s gotten his stories mixed up, combined them, and moves forward nonetheless.
In both cases, what’s missing isn’t a flaw in the writing—it’s the truth, shaped exactly how the character would (and wouldn’t) say it. That restraint, that refusal to over-narrate, is what makes them feel so devastatingly real.
Techniques for Building Mystery Through Memory
So how do you write mystery through memory without resorting to melodrama or artificial withholding?
Here are a few techniques that can help you build mystery from the inside out:
1. Fragment the timeline
Great stories often begin in the middle (there’s actually a fancy term for this—in media res). Let memory arrive the way it does in life—out of order, disjointed, often sparked by sensory triggers. A smell. A phrase. A gesture. Instead of crafting a tidy flashback, drop in a moment without warning, letting the reader (and the character) recognize its weight only in retrospect. Think of it as narrative déjà vu.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five explodes linearity in the name of psychological realism. Billy Pilgrim is “unstuck in time,” and the novel’s disjointed structure reflects the mental and emotional fragmentation caused by trauma. We don’t get a stable arc—we get flashes: war, suburbia, aliens, Dresden. The disorder mirrors Billy’s disorientation—his inability to make peace with what happened, or even to remember it cleanly.
2. Let emotion precede clarity
“A story is a way of saying, I felt this. Can you feel it too?” – George Saunders
Readers don’t need facts up front—they need feeling. Lead with disquiet, longing, shame—then reveal the event behind it later. This reversal mirrors the way trauma lingers: emotion first, explanation second. It also creates a slow burn of realization for the reader.
In Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee immerses us in the mental fog of a colonial bureaucrat whose sense of decency has eroded under the weight of complicity. We feel his unease long before we understand its source. His relationship with the so-called “barbarian” girl is described in detached, ambiguous terms—but the emotional current beneath it is unmistakable: desire, guilt, self-loathing. The moral center of the book is revealed not through confession, but through accumulation—through silences, evasions, and the slow crumbling of certainty.
3. Write around the event
A truly omniscient narrator would be boring. (And, let’s face it, utterly terrifying.)
Let your narrator mention things indirectly, or not at all. Use evasive language. Give them a blind spot. Build a world where certain things simply aren’t said. That silence becomes a shape—a negative space the reader begins to feel.
In Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Oskar never plainly says, “I miss my dad.” Instead, he catalogs facts, compulsively solves riddles, scours New York for a lock that fits a mysterious key. His grief is everywhere, but it’s diffused—transformed into questions and systems he can control. His grandfather, by contrast, has lost his voice entirely, communicating through handwritten letters and a notebook that says yes and no. Between the two of them, grief becomes architectural. What isn’t said becomes louder than what is.
4. Repeat with variation
When a memory resurfaces, don’t repeat it verbatim. Let it evolve—add new details, shift tone, reframe it. This mimics how memory reshapes itself over time. The reader learns to pay attention not just to what is said, but how it's been altered.
In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the same event—the death of Sethe’s baby—returns again and again in language that slips, bleeds, and refuses to settle. Each version gives you more, but never the whole. The instability is the truth.
5. Use sensory overload—or absence
Sometimes memory overwhelms. Other times it vanishes. Both are usable. A character might recall the sound of a gunshot but not the face of the person holding the weapon. Or they might only remember the way a towel smelled, or how the light bent across the floor. These fragments hint at trauma without giving it away.
In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes trauma as a collage of sensory impressions: the weight of a grenade, the stink of a corpse, the color of a distant explosion. Characters remember textures and smells long after the sequence of events has blurred. Some memories return with hallucinatory clarity; others vanish completely. The emotional truth lives in these fragments—not in their accuracy, but in their persistence. What the characters can’t say is often embedded in what they can’t stop seeing, smelling, or carrying.
The Want Beneath the Want
One of my writing mentors—and personal heroes—Stuart Dybek taught us that you should make your character want something right away, even if it’s just a glass of water. Humans are social creatures, he said. We care, even when we don’t think we do. We empathize. We recognize hunger, thirst, desire. And we’ll keep watching—keep reading—to see if that need is met.
Of course, in powerful literature, the desire is usually more complicated than a drink of water. Often, it isn’t even clear what the character wants. They’re restless. Haunted. Searching for something they can’t quite name. Or they’re chasing the wrong thing entirely. That’s where mystery enters again—not as a locked room or missing clue, but as longing itself. When a character doesn’t know what they need, the story becomes a search for that knowledge. And when we, the readers, start to see it before they do, we lean in. We wait. We hope. That tension—the gap between what a character wants and what they actually need—is its own kind of narrative gravity.
Try This: Exercises in Memory and Mystery
Want to put these principles into practice? Try one of the exercises below—or let them echo against something you’re already writing:
1. The Moment Before the Memory
Write a scene in which your character is triggered by a sound, smell, or gesture—but the memory itself never arrives. Let the emotional response ripple outward (anxiety, sadness, distraction), but keep the source unnamed.
Challenge: No flashback. Just resonance.
2. Unreliable by Omission
Write a first-person narrator who tells a story with calm clarity—but the reader can sense something’s wrong. Let clues emerge through tone, repetition, or contradiction.
Challenge: Let the reader suspect the truth before the narrator does.
3. Misremember on Purpose
Have a character retell a significant personal story—first in a way they’ve rehearsed for others (polished, self-protective), then in a version they begin to question.
Challenge: Use the second version to contradict—but not invalidate—the first.
4. Grief Without Naming It
Write a scene of mourning without using the words grief, loss, death, or sad. Focus on physical action, habitual behavior, or broken rituals.
Challenge: Convey sorrow without sentimentality or explanation.
5. The Wrong Desire
Write a scene where a character pursues something they think they want—but let the narrative reveal they’re really trying to meet a deeper, unacknowledged need.
Challenge: Use subtext and contrast to reveal their true longing.
This series exists to sharpen attention—to offer writers not a set of rules, but a deeper vocabulary for thinking about how narrative functions, what it asks of us, and what it can do when it’s built with care. The next installment, Principle #3: Restraint Builds Power, will explore how implication carries weight, why what you withhold is just as important as what you reveal, and how ambiguity can invite the reader to lean in, wonder, and do the necessary work. It will be published—like the rest of this series—whenever I take a notion.
In the meantime, I’ll be launching a new three-part series next week: Writing to Understand, which reimagines the personal statement not as performance, but as inquiry—an opportunity to write one’s way toward clarity, purpose, and meaning.
Until next time, just remember—you don’t need to know everything. You just need to know what to leave out.