From Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners: http://soundcloud.com/ryknight/a-good-man-is-hard-to-find Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners From: “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” 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 determined by the nature of our perceptive apparatus. The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where 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....
In progress.