What is Abstracting Realism (AR)?
Extended Explanation for Readers, Writers, and Researchers
Abstracting Realism™ is a new writing system designed to capture the way human consciousness actually works. Instead of presenting thoughts and emotions through explanation, summary, or traditional narration, AR brings the reader directly into the internal experience of the moment—thought by thought, shift by shift, layer by layer.
In real life, we do not think in perfectly shaped sentences. We think in flashes. Fragments.
Contradictions. Sensations. Micro-judgments. Emotional reactions that shift faster than language can fully describe.
Abstracting Realism™ was created to map this reality onto the page. The system blends spoken words, internal thoughts, emotional logic, micro-perceptions, and moment-to-moment thoughts into a single readable structure. It shows what is happening inside a character at the exact time it is happening—not after the fact and not in summary.
This gives the reader a fundamentally different experience: the story feels lived instead of observed.
Writers, educators, and researchers often describe the effect in the same way:
“It feels like a movie in your head.”
Why It Works
Abstracting Realism™ is built on six years of analysis and experimentation with how the mind processes experience—especially during emotionally intense or psychologically complex moments. The system reflects:
• layered awareness (thought + emotion + perception at once) • sensory flashpoints • hesitation and conflict • fast internal shifts • real-time decision-making logic • hesitation and conflict • internal vs. external alignment • the difference between what a character says and what they think
These dynamics appear naturally in the human mind. AR simply gives them a structure on the page.
What Makes AR Different
Most writing methods try to describe emotion. Abstracting Realism™ lets the reader experience it.
Traditional narration works from the outside inward. AR works from the inside outward. Instead of telling the reader what a character feels, AR reproduces the internal movement that creates the feeling. This is why AR scenes feel close, intimate, immediate, and psychologically realistic—even in fast pacing or high emotion.
Where AR Can Be Used
AR is not a genre. It is a writing system that can be applied to any genre:
• literary fiction • romance • thriller and suspense • YA • memoir • mystery
• psychological fiction • narrative nonfiction • hybrid and experimental forms
Any story that depends on emotion, tension, internal conflict, or character complexity benefits from AR’s structure.
Why AR Cannot Be Automated by AI
Abstracting Realism™ is based on internal human cognitive experience—something AI does not have.
AI can imitate formatting or tone, but AR requires lived perception, emotional logic, subconscious association, and intuitive micro-shifts that cannot be reproduced artificially.
This is one reason AR is gaining interest from universities, researchers, and writing programs.
The Core Promise of AR
Abstracting Realism™ offers writers a way to transfer the truth of human experience directly onto the page. It captures the invisible internal world—thoughts, reactions, emotional logic, intuition, contradiction—and makes it readable without explanation. The result is fiction that feels alive.
Memoir that feels honest. Scenes that feel immediate and immersive. Characters that think like real people.
It is the next evolution of “show, don’t tell”—a clear, structured, teachable way to show the invisible world of human consciousness.
Traditional stories tell you what happens. AR shows you how it feels from the inside out.