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Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) was one of the greatest fiction writers of the 20th century, and her essay, “Writing Short Stories,” from her collection of essays, Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1997), is a master class in storytelling.

Below I’ve distilled what I take to be the ten most significant points from O’Connor’s “master class.”

If you would like to do a deeper dive on O’Connor’s approach to storytelling, note that I am currently preparing a free eBook on O’Connor’s approach to comic fiction, which will include elaboration of the points below. If you would like to receive it, I invite you to subscribe to The Comic Muse and I will email it to you, free of charge, as soon as it is completed (hopefully by the end of this month of February 2023).

Now, here is O’Connor on the art of storytelling. Page numbers in parenthesis refer to the edition of Mystery and Manners cited above.

Do not approach story by treating “plot,” “character,” and “theme” as discrete items. A story is “a complete dramatic action” (90), and when there is a complete dramatic action, plot, character, and theme rise and fall together in one unified narrative ecosystem.

I add here a definition of story not found in O’Connor’s essay, but one with which I believe she would confirm: “A story is an ordered sequence of events with a beginning, middle, and end in which a protagonist pursues a goal and, after a series of progressive complications, either succeeds or fails in attaining the goal, by his or her own efforts, not by chance.”

A protagonist is a human person, and as such is a mystery that cannot be reduced to physical, political, economic, or other social forces.

“I myself prefer to say that a story is a dramatic event that involves a person because he is a person, and a particular person—that is, because he shares in the general human condition and in some specific situation. A story always involves, in a dramatic way, the mystery of personality” (90).

To focus your attention of the mystery of a specific personality is to focus on the humble and therefore to exercise humility. A human person is a small thing, but also a locus of infinitely mysterious depths. To gaze upon a specific personality demands a mortification of the grand designs of the preacher or lecturer.

“Now this [focusing on the mystery of a specific personality] is a very humble level to have to begin on, and most people who think they want to write stories are not willing to start there. They want to write about problems, not people; or about abstract issues, not concrete situations. They have an idea, or a feeling, or an overflowing ego, or they want to Be a Writer, or they want to give their wisdom to the world in a simple-enough way for the world to be able to absorb it. In any case, they don’t have a story and they wouldn’t be willing to write it if they did; and in the absence of a story, they set out to find a theory or a formula or a technique” (90-91).

It is inevitable that a writer will imagine a specific personality through the lens, or in the light of, the writer’s moral outlook—i.e. the writer’s understanding of the human good and what human life is all about. A story, because it deals with the mystery of personality, cannot help but embody a moral vision.

“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” (91).

Storytelling, like all other forms of human knowledge, begins with the senses. A story is convincing only insofar as it appeals to the sense by showing, in the detail appropriate to the kind of story it is, a specific character in a specific setting and situation. A story does not convince, first of all, by being a moral lesson.   

“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” (91).

“Fiction operates through the senses, and I think one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince through the senses” (91).

Storytelling is not “mere” entertainment, whatever that may mean. It is an act of moral persuasion, a “seeing” by the light of one’s moral vision, yet one that involves the delight we find in the representation of human action.

“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 to the story” (91).

Human beings only communicate with one another through their bodies. It is impossible to touch an audience emotionally or intellectually without grounding emotions and thoughts in the bodies of the characters, which is to say, primarily, in their actions (not merely their facial expressions or gestures)—see Point #1 above.

“I have found that stories of beginning writers usually bristle with emotion, but whose emotion is often very hard to determine. Dialogue frequently proceeds without the assistance of any characters that you can actually see, and uncontained thought leaks out of every corner of the story. The reason is usually that the student is wholly interested in his thoughts and his emotions and not in his dramatic action, and that he is too lazy or highfalutin to descend to the concrete where fiction operates” (92).

In a related essay, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” O’Connor writes: “A lady who writes, and whom I admire very much, wrote me that she had learned from Flaubert [Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1880, author of Madame Bovary] that it takes at least three activated sensuous strokes to make an object real; and she believes that this is connected without our having five senses. If you’re deprived of any of them, you’re in a bad way, but if you’re of more than two at once, you almost aren’t present” (69). 

Storytelling is not a telling but a showing. It is not a making of statements, but a manifestation of a complete dramatic action. An experience of story is like an excursion in a virtual reality simulation. Our whole being enters into the world of the story and “lives” there for a time. We are not in the position of a student listening to the teacher give a lecture.

“A story is a way of saying something that can’t be said in any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate” (96).

Every story has a literal meaning: what actually happens in the complete dramatic action. But a good story always goes beyond the literal.

“The peculiar problem of the short-story writer is how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible. He has only a short space to do it in and he can’t do it by statement. He has to do it by showing, not by saying [telling], and by showing the concrete—so that his problem is really how to make the concrete work double time for him” (98).

O’Connor’s whole understanding of meaning that goes beyond the literal is inspired by the tradition of the Catholic imagination, which has its roots in Catholic Biblical exegesis. According to this tradition, there are four levels of meaning to a story.

a. literal (rooted in the concrete, sensible world)

b. moral (related to our quest for ultimate goodness—happiness)

c. anagogical (a mystical or spiritual level of meaning involving allusions to the afterlife and especially to man’s last end: Heaven)

d. allegorical (related to the portrayal of types or forerunners of the life of grace)

“it is the peculiar characteristic of fiction that its literal surface can be made to yield entertainment on an obvious physical plane to one sort of reader while the selfsame surface can be made to yield meaning to the person equipped to experience it there” (95).

A good story always goes beyond the literal. Its vision radiates meaning: ethical, anagogical, and allegorical. “A short story should be long in depth and should give us an experience of meaning” (94).

In focusing on the literal, the concrete, the sensible, the writer is not giving up on these deeper levels of meaning. Indeed, God’s creation is so rich in meaning that even the humblest sensible thing (think of the matter of a sacrament) can radiate ethical, anagogical, and allegorical meanings.  

This is a photo of Flannery O’Connor’s writing desk at “Andalusia,” the farm near Milledgeville, Georgia where she lived with her mother. (Thanks to my sister, Mary Hosford, for the photo!)

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