Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (FSG Classics)

by Flannery O'Connor

“The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell,

The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions.

“She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff’s clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.”

The short story requires more drastic procedures than the novel because more has to be accomplished in less space. The details have to carry more immediate weight.

for the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.

You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

A story is a complete dramatic action—and in good stories, the characters are shown through the action and the action is controlled through the characters, and the result of this is meaning that derives from the whole presented experience.

showing how some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything.

All the action has to be satisfactorily accounted for in terms of motivation,

The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then to try to discover what you have done.

There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you.

An idiom characterizes a society, and when you ignore the idiom, you are very likely ignoring the whole social fabric that could make a meaningful character.

In most good stories it is the character’s personality that creates the action of the story.

I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity.

From my own experience in trying to make stories “work,” I have discovered that what is needed is an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally believable, and I have found that, for me, this is always an action which indicates that grace has been offered.

my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.

This is not to say that he doesn’t have to be concerned with adequate motivation or accurate references or a right theology; he does; but he has to be concerned with these only because the meaning of his story does not begin except at a depth where these things have been exhausted.

The more we learn about ourselves, the deeper into the unknown we push the frontiers of fiction.

A writer writes about what he is able to make believable.

The fiction writer has to make a whole world believable by making every part and aspect of it believable.

in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.