Like the driver of the car to the left, I love reading Flannery O’Connor’s work! Her short story collections, Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find, are among the finest I have ever read. If you love short stories and you haven’t read either of these collections, you owe it to yourself to pick these up right now!
This week, I have an excerpt from her classic essay, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction.” (You can find it in full in her book, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, a posthumous collection of previously unpublished essays and lectures.)
In this essay, O’Connor discusses the art of “story-writing,” and by “story-writing” she means to include novels, novellas, short stories, short shorts–anything “in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative.” However, like authors mentioned in my previous posts, O’Connor is concerned with writing from the senses. She says,
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.
O’Connor later examines a particular sentence from Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary:
Flaubert [shows] us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, ‘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 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 more you look at a sentence like that, the more you can learn from it. At one end of it, we are with Emma and this very solid instrument ‘whose strings buzzed,’ and at the other end of it we are across the village with this very concrete clerk in his list slippers. With regard to what happens to Emma in the rest of the novel, we may think that it makes no difference that the instrument has buzzing strings or that the clerk wears list slippers and has a piece of paper in his hand, but Flaubert had to create a believable village to put Emma in. It’s always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks.
The best prose–regardless if it takes the form of a novel, novella, short story, or short short–originates from the senses, rather than from abstraction. If you found this post helpful, or if you have any ideas for what I should post in the future, please leave me a comment below.
Until next week, settle into your creative trance and write your heart out!
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What sayest thou?