Free Mystery and Manners by Flannery O’Connor Page A

sort but that Jones is a particularly appalling example.
    Now in every writing class you find people who care nothing about writing, because they think they are already writers by virtue of some experience they’ve had. It is a fact that if, either by nature or training, these people can learn to write badly enough, they can make a great deal of money, and in a way it seems a shame to deny them this opportunity; but then, unless the college is a trade school, it still has its responsibility to truth, and I believe myself that these people should be stifled with all deliberate speed.
    Presuming that the people left have some degree of talent, the question is what can be done for them in a writing class. I believe the teacher’s work is largely negative, that it is largely a matter of saying “This doesn’t work because…” or “This does work because…” The because is very important. The teacher can help you understand the nature of your medium, and he can guide you in your reading. I don’t believe in classes where students criticize each other’s manuscripts. Such criticism is generally composed in equal parts of ignorance, flattery, and spite. It’s the blind leading the blind, and it can be dangerous. A teacher who tries to impose a way of writing on you can be dangerous too. Fortunately, most teachers I’ve known were too lazy to do this. In any case, you should beware of those who appear overenergetic.
    In the last twenty years the colleges have been emphasizing creative writing to such an extent that you almost feel that any idiot with a nickel’s worth of talent can emerge from a writing class able to write a competent story. In fact, so many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence. We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.

Writing Short Stories
    I have heard people say that the short story was one of the most difficult literary forms, and I’ve always tried to decide why people feel this way about what seems to me to be one of the most natural and fundamental ways of human expression. * After all, you begin to hear and tell stories when you’re a child, and there doesn’t seem to be anything very complicated about it. I suspect that most of you have been telling stories all your lives, and yet here you sit—come to find out how to do it.
    Then last week, after I had written down some of these serene thoughts to use here today, my calm was shattered when I was sent seven of your manuscripts to read.
    After this experience, I found myself ready to admit, if not that the short story is one of the most difficult literary forms, at least that it is more difficult for some than for others.
    I still suspect that most people start out with some kind of ability to tell a story but that it gets lost along the way. Of course, the ability to create life with words is essentially a gift. If you have it in the first place, you can develop it; if you don’t have it, you might as well forget it.
    But I have found that the people who don’t have it are frequently the ones hell-bent on writing stories. I’m sure anyway that they are the ones who write the books and the magazine articles on how-to-write-short-stories. I have a friend who is taking a correspondence course in this subject, and she has passed a few of the chapter headings on to me—such as, “The Story Formula for Writers,” “How to Create Characters,” “Let’s Plot!” This form of corruption is costing her twenty-seven dollars.
    I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are. I’ve heard students say, “I’m very good with plot, but I can’t do a