Deadly Competence

'There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented
by a good teacher" (Mystery & Manners 84-85).
Flannery O'Connor

Points for Reflection

Flannery O'Connor's "The Nature and Aim of Fiction"

1. What distinction does O’Connor make between writing and writing well?
2. Does O’Connor consider Henry James a conscientious writer or a writer for profit?
3. Into what potential traps do first-time fiction writers fall?
4. Does O’Connor believe writers should built fiction atop sensuous information or abstractions?
5. Do you agree with O’Connor’s claim that “the modern spirit” attempts to separate the spiritual and material like Manicheans and other gnostics (68)?
6. Why does O’Connor think literary naturalism a “dead end” in fiction?
7. Does an effective symbol function primarily beneath the surface of a story?
8. Which of the three types of meaning found in Scripture by medieval exegesis does O’Connor believe most important when writing fiction?
9. What do you think O’Connor means when she argues that the author has disappeared for modernist fiction by the time we read Henry James and James Joyce (74)?  What does she not mean?
10. Does O’Connor believe it possible to summarize the essence of novel?
11. O’Connor argues that, in the mid-twentieth century, fiction must be a “self-contained dramatic unit,” though she also recognizes that art forms endlessly evolve (75).  Are successful works of fiction still “self-contained” in this way?
12. What does it mean to ensure that a writer’s “moral sense” coincides with her/his “dramatic senses” (76)?
13. Does O’Connor encourage fiction writers to tell stories containing “complications about good subjects” in a straightforward manner?
14. Why does O’Connor recommend some form of “stupidity” for successful fiction writing?
15. Do you get the impression that O’Connor takes great pleasure in writing?
16. Does O’Connor believe that more happens in fiction written in the mid-twentieth century than fiction written in bygone eras?
17. Does O’Connor consider higher education necessary before a given reader can understand good fiction?
18. Does O’Connor agree with those maintain that proper fiction deals with the most familiar and normal?
19. Why might O’Connor discourage budding writers from seeing a “technique” to will allow them to write well?
20. What does O’Connor mean by the claim that a teacher’s work is largely negative when teaching creative writing (83, 86)?
    
    
    

Self-Portrait (1953)
Flannery O'Connor

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu