7 Day Story Writing Challenges: A Brief Guide to Writing Psychological Fiction
This guide is all about psychological fiction. What it is, tips for writing it, and a list of psychological stories you can read online for free. We also discuss the difficulties, limitations, and pitfalls of writing in this genre. This guide is a must-read for anyone assigned psychological fiction in a 7 Day Story Writing Challenge, or for anyone wanting to explore new or unfamiliar literary genres!
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What is Psychological Fiction?
For the purposes of our 7 Day Story Writing Challenges, we’re defining psychological fiction as a story which does at least one of the following: explores the nature of the mind; has a particular focus on interior characterisation or the examination of the psychological motivations of characters; plays with mental, emotional or psychological states; examines the human psyche; or seeks to play with the reader’s mind in some way.
Difficulties, Limitations and Pitfalls of This Genre
Psychological short stories can be difficult if you haven’t written this type of fiction before. Your first inclination might be to write a first person story with a lot of interior thoughts. These kinds of stories can actually be the most difficult to pull off because how interesting your story is will be determined by how interesting that character is. Also, these kinds of stories can feel quite confining for the reader because we never get to see outside of the character. If you feel confident going in this direction, that’s fine, but it definitely is just one option!
Top Tips for This Genre
If you’re struggling with this genre, a really simple way to come up with the idea for a psychological story is to give one character some kind of obsession, compulsion, or addiction and to explore this in the story. Addictions and compulsions can really hijack and take over a person’s psychology, almost using their own mind against them in order to satisfy the need for whatever it is they’re craving. This means that the character’s own mind becomes the antagonist of the story and whether they succumb to their compulsion or not becomes the major conflict. This is only one way to write a psychological story, but it’s a good way to go if your mind is still blank halfway through the challenge. Not only does it fit the brief, but as we said, you’ve already got your conflict and your antagonist in place from the get-go. Your character’s obsession could be a person, it could be a cake in a bakery window, it could be murder. Their addiction could be drugs or it could be biting their nails. There really are a million different stories that could come from this general idea.
Psychological Fiction Short Stories you can Read Online
‘Wood Sorrel House’ by Zach Williams
‘Diary of a Madman’ by Nikolai Gogol
‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been’ by Joyce Carol Oates
‘Detour’ by Joyce Carol Oates
‘The Man Who Knew How’ by Dorothy Sayers
‘Gentle Spirit’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky
‘Moon-Face’ by Jack London