
“The kind of written work I’m going to talk about is story-writing, because that’s the only kind I know anything about. I’ll call any length of fiction a story, whether it be a novel or a shorter piece, and I’ll call anything a story in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative. I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing. When they realize that they aren’t writing stories, they decide that the remedy for this is to learn something that they refer to as the ‘technique of the short story’ or ‘the technique of the novel.’ Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.
“I think we have to begin thinking about stories at a much more fundamental level, so I want to talk about one quality of fiction which I think is its least common denominator — the fact that it is concrete and about a few of the qualities that follow from this. We will be concerned in this with the reader in his fundamental human sense, because the nature of fiction is in large measure determined by the nature of our perceptive apparatus. 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. It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object that they actually see. But the world of the fiction writer is full of matter, and this is what the beginning fiction writers are very loath to create. They are concerned primarily with unfleshed ideas and emotions. They are apt to be reformers and to want to write because they are possessed not by a story but by the bare bones of some abstract notion. They are conscious of problems, not of people, of questions and issues, not of the texture of existence, of case histories and of everything that has a sociological smack, instead of with all those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth.
“The Manicheans separated spirit and matter. To them all material things were evil. They sought pure spirit and tried to approach the infinite directly without any mediation of matter. This is also pretty much the modern spirit, and for the sensibility infected with it, fiction is hard if not impossible to write because fiction is so very much an incarnational art.”
— from “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1961)
Related reading and listening
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Links to posts and programs featuring Richard DeClue:
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Links to posts and programs featuring Brady Stiller:
- Flannery at 100 — In honor of Flannery O’Connor’s 100th birthday, we have gathered here an aural feast of interviews with O’Connor scholars and aficionados discussing her life, work, and faith. (3 hours, 28 minutes)
- When philosophy loses its way —
FROM VOL. 52 Ralph McInerny (1929–2010) speaks about themes from his 1999 Gifford Lectures, which relate how natural theology came to be regarded as pointless, resulting in a philosophical dead end.(24 minutes) - The story of the demotion of stories — Malcolm Guite on the Enlightenment’s rash dismissal of poetic knowledge
- The risk of stories — George Steiner on the necessity of vulnerable imaginations
- The grotesque and the transcendent — Christina Bieber Lake on why Flannery O’Connor’s readers have to work
- The dangers of the life of the mind — Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., on why Flannery O’Connor encouraged the cultivation of “Christian skepticism”
- The artist’s commitment to truth — Fr. Damian Ference, author of Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist, explores the depths to which Flannery O’Connor was steeped in Thomistic philosophy. (18 minutes)
- The (super)natural theology of fairy-tales — Alison Milbank describes Chesterton’s belief that story-telling is an affirmation of transcendent meaning
- Remembering Miss O’Connor — Literary critic Richard Gilman shares impressions of his relationship with Flannery O’Connor
- Ralph C. Wood: “Rapidly Rises the Morning Tide: An Essay on P. D. James’s The Children of Men” — Ralph C. Wood discusses the way in which the futuristic dystopia of P. D. James's novel, The Children of Men, reveals much about the West’s modern spiritual confusion and about the possible sources of hope beyond that chaos. (39 minutes)
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- Prudence in politics —
FROM VOL. 146 Henry T. Edmondson, III talks about Flannery O’Connor’s understanding of political life, which was influenced by a range of thinkers including Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Eric Voegelin, and Russell Kirk. (19 minutes) - Place and imagination — Matthew Stewart on Wallace Stegner’s moral laboratories
- On remembering and recognition — In memory of Frederick Buechner’s life, Ken Myers shares from his 1996 conversation with the acclaimed writer. Also heard are two interviews with novelist Ron Hansen about the craft of writing fiction. (29 minutes)
- On faithful fiction: Larry Woiwode, Alan Jacobs, & Jay Tolson — This Friday Feature represents three interviews on fiction from Volume 3: Larry Woiwode on what makes good fiction, Alan Jacobs on P. D. James’s The Children of Men, and Jay Tolson on Walker Percy. (29 minutes)
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- Insights into O’Connor’s development as a writer —
FROM VOL. 160 Jessica Hooten Wilson discusses her experience studying and organizing Flannery O’Connor’s unfinished third novel, Why Do the Heathen Rage? (27 minutes) - Immersion in a different time —
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- Foolishness, gravity, and the Church — In this essay, Albert L. Shepherd V explains why George MacDonald’s story “The Light Princess” is meant for “all who are childlike in faith and imagination.” (8 minutes)
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- Art and the truth of things — Joseph Nicolello explains the origins and themes of his imaginary dialogue between Jacques Maritain and Flannery O’Connor. (28 minutes)
- A myth which is also a fact — Holly Ordway on the existentially resonant power of myth