Most of Flannery O'Connor's advice to writers comes from talks she gave at colleges and workshops, later collected in Mystery and Manners. It's practical and a little stern, and it comes straight out of the way she actually worked, all fixed hours and close attention.
The Habit of Writing
O'Connor didn't believe in waiting for inspiration. She thought talent was common and fragile, and that the only thing keeping it alive was showing up to work on a schedule. She called herself a believer in habits and meant it literally. The morning session wasn't a preference. It was the thing that kept the whole enterprise from drying up.
I'm a full-time believer in writing habits, pedestrian as it all may sound. You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away.
Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners
It sounds grim, and O'Connor knew it. She wasn't promising that discipline makes the writing good. She was saying discipline is the only thing that keeps you in position for the good writing to happen, on the rare morning it decides to. Genius might get away with waiting for the mood. The rest of us can't afford to.
The advice that follows is unglamorous. Sit down at the same time every day. Stay there even when nothing comes, because being present is most of the job. She warned that if you skip the dull mornings, you won't be at the desk on the morning the work finally arrives. None of it depends on feeling talented on a given day, and that's the whole point: the habit carries you across the flat mornings until a live one shows up.
Look Hard, and Show Instead of Say
Her other great theme was attention. O'Connor thought most beginning writers didn't look at the world closely enough to render it, and that fiction is built from concrete, specific detail rather than abstract meaning stated outright. Her workshops came back to the same complaint again and again: students wrote about feelings and ideas without ever putting a solid, seeable world on the page. Fiction begins where human perception begins, she insisted, in the country of the senses. The writer's job is to show the reader something through the eyes and ears, and she had little patience for stories that stopped to announce their themes.
She was just as tough on self-indulgence. Writing wasn't therapy or a way to feel important, in her view, and the beginner's ego was usually the first thing that had to go. For the fuller picture of how she lived this out day to day, see the full Flannery O'Connor writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Protect the habit over the mood. O'Connor built talent's survival on routine, not inspiration. Show up on schedule and let the work find you there.
- Sit through the empty days. Her rule was blunt: miss the boring mornings and you'll miss the good one too, because you won't be in the chair.
- Render, don't explain. Give the reader concrete detail they can see and hear. Trust the scene to carry the meaning instead of stating it.
- Leave your ego at the door. She treated writing as work in service of the story. Cut whatever's only there to impress.