O'Connor on recognizing (and writing) good stories
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Flannery O’Connor at home in Milledgeville, 1962
This morning I made it a point to track down the exact wording of a line from Flannery O’Connor that has stuck with me for years. After some digging around I finally uncovered it. The line comes from “Writing Short Stories,” a lecture for writing students collected in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. For context, here’s the full paragraph in which the line appears:
“A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and when it continues to escape you.”
Now I am not so naive as to suppose that most people come to writers’ conferences in order to hear what kind of vision is necessary to write stories that will become a permanent part of our literature. Even if you do wish to hear this, your greatest concerns are immediately practical. You want to know how you can actually write a good story, and further, how you can tell when you’ve done it; and so you want to know what the form of a short story is, as if the form were something that existed outside of each story and could be applied or imposed on the material. Of course, the more you write, the more you will realize that the form is organic, that it is something that grows out of the material, that the form of each story is unique. A story that is any good can’t be reduced, it can only be expanded. A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and when it continues to escape you. In fiction two and two is always more than four.
All the books that have had lasting meaning for me, that have kept on teaching me things, and have only grown with the years rather than diminishing and falling away, have precisely this quality—of offering you more and more out of a well that is in no danger of running dry. There’s more where this came from, somewhere down below.
There is also a wonderfully anti-Platonic emphasis on the particular and organic in that paragraph—fitting for a woman who described herself as a “hillbilly Thomist” (a label I have been trying to appropriate for years). I have definitely seen form emerge from my own work more often than I have imposed form on it. Each story has a way it wants—needs—to be told. The writing of it will reveal it.
On that note, a final thought: Immediately after the above passage, O’Connor writes:
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. The time to think of technique is when you’ve actually got the story in front of you.
This is, in fact, some of the best advice she offers in the lecture. (A footnote at the beginning of the text in Mystery and Manners quotes her elsewhere saying that “Before I started writing stories, I suppose I could have given you a pretty good lecture on the subject, but nothing produces silence like experience, and at this point I have very little to say about how stories are written.”) Learn by doing. Tinker and figure it out. What stops us—what stops me—from simply writing a story is aiming at perfection the first time through.
While I was writing Dark Full of Enemies some years ago, friends in a writing group encouraged me to complete what they called a “get-words-on-paper draft.” That proved immensely helpful, and helped me better understand a line from Chesterton that has always nagged at and bothered the perfectionist that hunches in one tidy corner of my soul: “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.”
Do, and you will eventually do well.
