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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.  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 everything that has a sociological smack, instead of all those concrete details of life that make actual our position on the earth.

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            Now the second common characteristic of fiction follows from this, and it is that fiction is presented in such a way that the reader has the sense that it is unfolding around him.  This doesn’t mean he has to identify himself with the character or feel compassion for the character or anything like that.  It just means that fiction has to be largely presented rather than reported.  Another way to say it is that though fiction is a narrative art, it relies heavily on the element of drama.

            The story is not as extreme a form of drama as the play, but if you know anything about the history of the novel, you know that the novel as an art form has developed in the direction of dramatic unity.

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            But there’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once.  The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it’s well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world, no matter how limited his particular scene.  For him, the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima affects life on the Oconee River, and there’s not anything he can do about it.

            People are always complaining that the modern novelist has no hope and that the picture he paints of the world is unbearable.  The only answer to this is that people without hope do not write novels.  Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.  I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality.  It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.  If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won’t survive the ordeal.

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From: “Writing Short Stories”

           

            Now none of this is to say that when you write a story, you are supposed to forget or give up any moral position that you hold.  Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.  For the writer of fiction, everything has its testing point in the eye, and the eye is an organ that eventually involves the whole personality, and as much of the world as can be got into it.  It involves judgment.  Judgment is something that begins in the act of vision, and when it does not, or when it becomes separated from vision, then a confusion exists in the mind which transfers itself to the story.

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            Fiction is an art that calls for the strictest attention to the real—whether the writer is writing a naturalistic story or a fantasy.  I mean that we always begin with what is or with what has an eminent possibility of truth about it.  Even when one writes a fantasy, reality is the proper basis of it.  A thing is fantastic because it is so real, so real that it is fantastic.  Graham Greene has said that he can’t write, “I stood over a bottomless pit,” because that couldn’t be true, or “Running down the stairs I jumped into a taxi,” because that couldn’t be true either.  But Elizabeth Bowen can write about one of her characters that “she snatched at her hair as if she heard something in it,” because that is eminently possible.

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From: “The Teaching of Literature”

            It is the business of fiction to embody mystery through manners, and mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind.  About the turn of the century, Henry James wrote that the young woman of the future, though she would be taken out for airings in a flying-machine, would know nothing of mystery or manners.  James had no business to limit the prediction to one sex; otherwise, no one can very well agree disagree with him.  The mystery he was talking about is the mystery of our position on earth, and the manners are those conventions which, in the hands of the artist, reveal that central mystery.