My work is emotionally autobiographical. It has no relationship to the actual events of my life, but it reflects the emotional currents of my life. I try to work every day, because you have no refuge but writing.
Tennessee Williams
The Mind in the Cave
Barcelona’s Gothic’ February 2013
You can see Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind at the British Museum. The fiction writer paints both temporal coordinates (state of mind, emotional circumstances,) while specifying place, character and situation. All of this on our modern day cave walls. The talented writer has a knack for understanding emotion. We trace a scene step by step, building a readers sense of the truth by nailing the state of mind. Once we’ve developed a character the reader comes to expect them to be consistent and of course the whole game is to force the character to make the unanticipated choice. If you trace what the character in a story confronts and then what action they take you are looking at the author’s emotional biographical mind. This is our shared humanity, the same humanity we glimpse on the cave wall.
HOT SPRING HONEYMOON
“I am not a sacred type being,”
“Fletcher McCrea,” Keefe argued, “You are just what the good lord needs.”
“I don’t even go to church,”
“Everybody knows that,” Keefe said. “What’s even better there isn’t a soul in town less likely to invoke a sense of the divine.”
“I should stick to what I’m good at.”
“The last thing we need is someone actually pretending to be truly sacred come out here and muck up everything.”
“My talent is in talking a woman into bed.”
