The Super-Conscious Mind
Just as Tolkien used the entire mythos of Middle-earth to assist him in processing what he had witnessed in the First World War and in his life overall, many writers use their writing as a kind of therapy or way of addressing deep, partly-glimpsed concerns about the world. I’m not suggesting that anyone’s writing is necessarily a form of psychoanalysis. My own view is that, as well as an ‘unconscious mind’, we have a higher level of mental function which I’ll term a ‘super-
A Quick Word on Horror Stories
Horror stories belong in the Irony quadrant of my genre circle, as outlined in my book How Stories Really Work . Irony - and its subset horror - draw their power from two main sources: 1. The expectations arising from the conventional tropes of the Epic genre, in which events are presented as real and external and the subjective state of the characters (and thus of the audience) is less a focus than the outward action and movement of the story. Epics place a great emphasi