The Stories I'm Not Showing You

I was reading The Son of Neptune while listening to music when Just a Man came on.

I knew nothing about EPIC: The Musical at the time. I didn't know who had written the song, what musical it belonged to, or even that it was about Odysseus. I was simply listening while I read, half expecting the song to become background noise.

Then the first strum of the guitar came in.

It made me pause and give the song my full attention.

As I listened, I began to picture a soldier sitting on a tree stump somewhere hot and dry. He was far from home, surrounded by a landscape shaped by war. Standing in front of him was a child from a foreign land, a child who somehow reminded him of his own son.

In my mind, the soldier played his guitar and sang to the child.

The song became a conversation between the two of them, even though the child never needed to say a word. The soldier was lamenting what he had to do, knowing that harming this child would feel like harming his own son. He was caught between the duty that had brought him there and the family waiting for him somewhere far away. In my imagination, he wasn't simply asking the child for forgiveness. He was also asking his son for forgiveness for everything he was missing while he was away.

None of that was actually in front of me.

It wasn't until the song ended that I realised just how much had happened inside my own head. I had been moved by a song without even knowing the story it was actually telling. The real song was about Odysseus and the impossible choice he faced. What I had experienced was an unnamed soldier, a foreign child, a distant battlefield, a guitar, and a family waiting somewhere beyond it all.

I had created an entire movie in my mind about an unnamed soldier and a child that I can still see clearly to this day.

And that was the moment something clicked for me.

If a song could make me see a story that wasn't actually there, without ever explicitly showing me any of it, what could an entire story do if it was designed to work that way on purpose?

That question is what first drew me towards what I now think of as theatre of the mind.

What Does "Theatre of the Mind" Mean?

Theatre of the mind is storytelling through sound that lets the listener construct an imagined world for themselves. Rather than showing the audience everything, the storyteller provides the sounds, performances, words, music, and atmosphere that give the imagination something to build from.

But the most interesting part of theatre of the mind is not simply that a story can exist without pictures. It is that the listener is the one who creates them.

A few footsteps can tell you someone is approaching. A creaking door can tell you a character has entered an old building. A shift in the acoustic space can make you feel that someone has moved from a crowded tavern into a quiet corridor. None of it actually shows you anything. Your mind does that part.

When I began developing Tales from the Skald, I wasn't interested in just recording people reading dialogue and adding music afterward. I wanted to create something a listener could close their eyes and step inside.

The Listener Becomes Part of the Production

This is the part of theatre of the mind that fascinates me most.

In film, the production creates the image for you. A director decides what the room looks like. A production designer builds it. A cinematographer decides where the camera sits. An actor's face carries the expression. The audience receives the image.

Theatre of the mind works differently. It gives the audience ingredients and lets them assemble the picture. You hear footsteps and your mind decides what the ground looks like. You hear a door creak and your mind supplies the door. You hear a voice and start building a person around it: their face, their clothes, their posture, the room they're standing in, the distance between them and everyone else in the scene.

Because your imagination is doing that work, the result belongs partly to you. Two people can listen to the same scene, same words, same performances, same sound design, and walk away with different images in their heads.

That makes the listener more than an audience member. The storyteller provides the framework. The listener completes it.

The Space Between What Is Said and What Is Seen

One of the most powerful things about theatre of the mind is what it lets you leave out.

There's a temptation in storytelling to explain everything: show the creature, show the castle, show exactly what the character sees. But imagination can be more powerful than certainty. If a character hears something moving through the trees, I don't need to show you the creature. I can let you hear it: a branch snaps, something moves through the undergrowth, the character stops breathing for a moment, then silence.

Now your imagination has somewhere to go. You might picture something enormous; someone else, something small and fast; someone else again, something that doesn't resemble anything they've seen before. The story gives you enough to create an image, but not enough to fully define it.

That gap between what's said and what's seen is where mystery lives, where tension grows, and often where the most interesting part of a story actually happens.

I don't want to replace the listener's imagination with my own. I want to give their imagination something to work with. It's a bit like handing someone a handful of pigments instead of a finished painting: the colours are there, the shapes are suggested, the atmosphere is set, but the final image belongs partly to the person looking at it.

That doesn't mean everything should stay vague. Good theatre of the mind still needs specificity. A particular environment should tell you something. A character's voice should tell you something. A piece of music should mean something. A silence should have a reason for existing. The trick is knowing what to define and what to leave open.

How I Use Theatre of the Mind

That question stayed with me. I started thinking about what would happen if sound became the visual language of a production, not something placed underneath a story, but the thing that builds it.

When I work on an audio production, I try to treat every element of sound as part of the world.

Voice acting isn't just delivering dialogue: a voice carries age, personality, emotion, confidence, fear, distance, and intent. Dialogue can establish a place as much as description can: what characters know, and don't know, tells you something about the world around them. Ambience should do more than announce a location; a forest scene shouldn't get generic "forest sounds" just because it's set in a forest. The sound has to contribute to the feeling of that particular place. Environmental sound can tell the listener what's happening outside the immediate conversation. Music carries emotion, establishes scale, builds anticipation, reveals cultural identity, transforms a moment. Silence can matter just as much as any of it.

Then there's mixing: getting all of those elements to exist in relation to one another. Voices need to occupy space. Sounds need to come from somewhere. Environments need depth. Music needs to support the performances, not smother them.

The goal isn't for the listener to notice the sound design. It's for them to feel the world without thinking about how it was built.

Theatre of the Mind and Skaldenreach

This philosophy fits naturally within Skaldenreach, a world built out of stories: told beside fires, passed between communities, recounted by travellers, changed as they move from one generation to the next, remembered differently by different people, some becoming famous, others surviving only because one person happened to tell them to another.

That's part of why Tales from the Skald exists. The Skald isn't a narrator bolted onto an anthology because it sounds fantastical. He represents something that already exists within the world. People in Skaldenreach tell stories to entertain each other, to remember, to warn, to make sense of things they don't understand. And sometimes just because sitting beside a fire with other people, listening to someone speak, is a wonderful way to spend an evening.

Tales from the Skald lets those stories feel as though they've been carried out of Skaldenreach and set beside the listener's own fire. The listener becomes another person hearing the Skald's stories, and imagination does the rest.

Building a World Through Sound

Tales from the Skald is only one part of what I'm building through Kinver Studios. My larger body of work centres on Skaldenreach and includes the Mosswyn Hollow novels, audio storytelling, worldbuilding, and future projects across other media.

Each medium offers a different way into the world, and that's one of the things I love most about building an original universe. A world doesn't have to exist in only one form. It can be written, spoken, performed, heard. It can be remembered by one character and misunderstood by another. It can appear in a novel as someone's lived experience and later resurface, in a completely different form, as a story told around a fire.

The world stays bigger than any single story told in it. That's what I want Skaldenreach to feel like: not a backdrop that exists because a particular story needs somewhere to happen, but a place that has its own life beyond the page or the recording.

What Theatre of the Mind Means to Me

Ultimately, theatre of the mind is about trust: trusting the audience to imagine, trusting sound to communicate, trusting a performance to carry emotion, trusting silence to mean something. And trusting that the image someone builds in their own mind can end up more personal, and more memorable, than anything I could have shown them.

I don't want to tell you exactly what to see. I want to give you enough to see something.

That's what theatre of the mind means to me: storytelling that leaves room for the audience to imagine, to interpret, to participate.

The story doesn't end when the sound reaches your ears. That's where it begins.