Cranking It Out

Like nearly everyone, my time is limited and my aspirations are not. Twelve weeks ago I thought perhaps that I could go against the tide and achieve one of my lifelong goals without it falling prey to the limitations of time. Guess what? I did and it didn't. How wonderful! How marvelous! The thrill of writing a complete short story meeting my standards for entertainment, philosophical content, and satisfying conclusion was so delicious and energizing as to take me to a higher plane of existence where I dwelt for some days. It is an experience I want to repeat. I want to become addicted to the feeling of accomplishment associated with completed fiction. Prior to this semester of creative writing, I had no idea of the empowerment awaiting at the final sentence, the denouement of a fiction created by the focusing my creative energies.

Now comes the time for the hard part, the troubling future. Were I to be honest with myself, I would admit that my plate is too full with time commitments inconsistent with a writer's life. Instead, it is likely that I will continue to deceive myself, thinking "this quandary will succumb to the forces of my will," when I know with certainty it won't. One option is to add the commitment of enrolling in an online MFA program. Truth be told, I have already applied to a couple of these programs and find reminders of my reluctant, halting, start-stop progress lurking in my gmail every month as the schools continue to send follow-up inquiries and enthusiastic encouragements to sign a check and enter the rabbit hole. Goodness, what to do?

There is a psychological mechanism at work in these deliberations, one I've come to acknowledge only within the last few years: I am a better student than entrepreneur. For, when one examines the most basic attribute of a successful, successively published author, one particular quality comes to the fore. Agents, contracts and partners aside, an author must work alone in the hope of finding a market. Writing must be a business or it is nothing but a dabble in creative aimlessness. The hundreds of pages and hundred of thousands of words I have written have so far have only been read by my teachers and fellow students. In other words, people who are compensated in one way or another for focusing their eyes and brains on my work are the only ones who have entered into the realm of Osborne's literature.

I am very accustomed to being a student and methodically cranking out responses to assignments so as to remove them from my to-do list and earn a grade. I am kept going by the little endorphin shots generated from seeing those grades posted along with the encouraging and often entertaining commentary from professors. The problem comes when I have to give up the little doses of pleasurable brain chemistry for an extended period of time during which I must "toil in obscurity," a cliché unavoidable for it's accuracy in regard to the image of me sitting along before a keyboard without the luxury of knowing that at least one person will read what I am cranking out and give me a little reward.

Will I take the easy, though expensive way out by committing to an MFA, of will I writer-up and do the hard work on my own? I wish I knew the answer. Does it really make sense to pursue a masters degree when, as I presume, the majority of published fiction authors never bothered to sign on the dotted line of a university contract and send in their check in hopes of finding a path to publication? My gut says no don't do it, but my wayward heart says yes. I just like school too much. 

Friedrich Nietzsche — 'One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.'

LOVE PILE: Trippin' with Flannery O'Connor

For this post, I chose to follow up on a short story suggested by Paxton, one of the students in my creative writing class at Sierra College. While the story she mentioned is not her favorite, nor mine, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" by Flannery O' Connor, is a work worthy of any fiction writer's attention because of O'Connor's unique ability to combine humor and horror in the everyday world of the Southern United States. Consider the impromptu eulogy offered by for the grandmother by the story's lead psychopath after he murdered her. "She would've been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." The sentence is so odd and yet so compelling. Trippin' with Flanner O'Connor is a journey into the gothic soul of a strange land, y'all.

There has been a lot of ink spilled in the debate between those who think a reader's knowledge about an author adds value to the reading experience and those who think such background is an interference. Although O'Connor's stories stand on their own, I firmly believe her biography adds to my enjoyment and understanding when reading her. Commentaries are also helpful, and through my brief peering into O'Connor's background I discovered her strong Catholic faith, high intelligence, and hidden agenda in the "Christ-haunted South." She was a Catholic in Georgia, a land dominated by evangelical Protestants, and thus she was a misfit herself. She excelled at everything she put her hand to and was a perfectionist who polished the novel Wise Blood for many months. Most important of all, she wrote in the Southern Gothic mode of horror in order to show how people act when they face danger and death. She did so in order to demonstrate to everyone the need for repentance. And yet, when she writes, she hardly ever preaches unless doing so from the shallow, self-centered, self-deceived thoughts of the freaks populating her stories. How her stories are supposed to be a call to return to Jesus still puzzles me. I cannot imagine figuring out O'Connor's intent without knowing something of her background.

I wonder how deeply an author can bury an agenda without drowning it. O'Connor keeps hers pretty well hidden. I have tried to emulate, though poorly, O'Connor's style to the extent of letting the story speak for itself without layering it with explanations or, God forbid, pontifications. This is a hard thing to do. Striking the balance between allowing a reader to wander down the garden path immersed in the lives and actions of the characters, on the one hand, and spelling things out on the other, is so difficult as to grind my keyboarding to a halt. I want to take a look at some examples of how O'Connor takes readers by the hand without letting them know she is doing so, until the got'cha comes.

In "A Good Man is Hard to Find," O'Connor uses foreshadowing to good effect. The grandmother is fearful of going to Florida because The Misfit is on the loose. "I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal ... aloose in it." She wants to stay behind, and yet she doesn't. The little girl, June Star, says of the grandmother, "She wouldn't stay at home to be queen for a day." Still later, the it is the restaurant owner who provides the title for the story, raises the tension, and gives the grandmother's unconscious mind the ludicrous idea that she can later make a bad man into a good man by persuasion. There is a lot going on, therefore, when Red Sammy says, "A good man is hard to find. Every- thing is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more." The grandmother should never have left home.

The way in which there are no wasted words in O'Connor's work is worth studying. She does not go down any side paths unless there is a reason. The stop at Red Sammy's for lunch allows the conversation about danger to continue. This story is all about potential danger and the senseless violence that can enter anyone's life at any time. There are other subtle hints of danger that can work in the back of the reader's mind. The obnoxious boy, John Wesley, asks the grandmother, "If you don't want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?" The grandmother never answers the question except to challenge, "...what would you do if this fellow, The Misfit, caught you?" The only recourse the grandmother sees for herself is fatalistic rationalization. She has her white cotton gloves, her purse, and her "collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace." Why is this important? The narrator answers, 'In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady." This is a funny way of thinking, and the reader is drawn into the grandmother's mind.

There are other writing lessons to be imbibed at the knee of Flanner O'Connor. Among them are:

Flat and round characters are used to focus the reader's attention. With little exception, this story is filled with flats and only the grandmother and The Misfit are round and interesting.

No one in the story really changes except for the grandmother. This fact underscores the idea that, in the end, even the most determined and most self-assured among us must succumb to a greater power. The grandmother is a headstrong woman who refuses to admit her inability to control her fate, until she grovels before The Misfit and mangles logic in an attempt to save her own life.

Throughout the story are examples of dialect. Here is a example portrayed by the serial use of "don't" and the combining of words, southern style, in The Misfit's speech: "Lady," he said, "don't you get upset. Sometimes a man says things he don't mean. I don't reckon he meant to talk to you thataway." Dialect has climbed up near the top of my own priorities in the techniques for creation of interesting dialog.

Knowing how important re-writes were to O'Connor, I am inspired by the way she sculpted every aspect of her story. Here is a good example of exposition that doesn't come off as such. "When he smiled he showed a row of strong white teeth. 'God never made a finer woman than my mother and my daddy's heart was pure gold,' he said." I can imagine the author re-reading her story and then adding this bit of description to put the reader off balance. The Misfit could be a "good man," except that he wasn't and there was no reason offered as to why. The grandmother, her family, The Misfit, ...none of them control their lives. So, beware! Evil is alive in this world (and salvation had better be grasped before it's too late).