Flannery O’Connor On Writing
Fiction should be both canny and uncanny. – Flannery O’Connor
One of my favourite short stories is Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard To Find – it certainly has a powerful ending. Her stories can be dark but there’s always a redemptive thread in them. O’Connor wrote despite the pain of lupus which ended her life at the age of 39. Here are some of her thoughts about the writing process (from Mystery and Manners):
If you want to write well and live well at the same time, you’d better arrange to inherit money.
When I sit down to write, a monstrous reader looms up who sits down beside me and continually mutters, ‘I don’t get it, I don’t see it, I don’t want it.’
Fiction is about everything human and we are made of dust, and if you scorn getting dusty, then you shouldn’t write fiction.
There’s a certain grain of stupidity that the fiction writer can hardly do without and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting to the point at once.
The artist uses her reason to discover an answering reason in everything she sees.
The writer has to judge himself with a stranger’s eye and a stranger’s severity.
