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Photo by Gail Harvey, no reproduction without permission
Flannery Will Get You Everywhere There are writers whom serious fiction writers are supposed to have read. The list is long and also, subjective, dependent on the source of the intellectual Shoulds-du-Jour. I suppose the shame and guilt around these Esteemed Authors is waning: you are more likely to feel an urge to bluff [lie] or bashfully confess to overlooked TV popular TV shows and youtube clips at this year’s dinner parties.
There are also writers that wait for you to find them on life’s roadside. Like hitchhikers you once sped past, you find yourself slowing down, re-considering them. Picking them up and being awfully glad you did. Later, after a conversation you’re thrilled you had, a mental meal in some enchanted diner or down-a-lane bistro, you drop them off and wonder how it was you got so lucky. Why you decided, after all those years of NEVER picking up a hitcher who sounded/looked like THAT, you found yourself pulling over.
I read quite a lot. Less than many and more than others. I often fantasize about having four heads, not so that I could work at a sideshow [do they still exist? Yes.] but so that I might read more and also so that I might release the too-many books brewing inside my own mind. But life generally only ever blesses us with one head to work with/on/around and so I am forced to read and write one thing at a time. So the road trip analogy works. Except when you imagine those people who read or text-message on the 401. That kind of reading plus driving metaphor stuff is just plain alarming and wrong to encourage. However.
This not-so-hot summer, I was driving along and Flannery O’Connor stood waiting on the side of the road of my life. Being Flannery O’Connor, she of the Should-Read authors, she felt no need for frantic waving. I had driven past her before, many times, her “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” the subject of so many childish literary puns I could hardly look her in the eye. There was the additional rumour of her determined Christianity, which for some decades of my life put her in a NO WAY category. Youthful minds are good at boxing things up and shoving them off. And no one is more arrogant than the twentysomething fiction writer.
I had been reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. It’s quite enjoyable, interesting and not unlike riding with a very intelligent but strident passenger. I continue to read it, though in small doses. But on a recent morning I wandered into my office and gazed at my bookshelf and scanned and gazed some more, wanting something specific while having no idea what and there she was, like a lone woman on the side of an early morning road, patient with her suitcase, which within one perfect sentence she unpacked for me.
There could be no better writer to stumble across when learning to write scripts than Flannery O’Connor. And I will direct you to the first sentence of her work, “Wise Blood” to see just what makes me say so.
Whereas I yelped with delight at the conversations I once had with the mind of Carson McCullers, whose titles were of course delicious come-ons and always will be [Ballad of The Sad Café, The Heart is A Lonely Hunter: OH!], I find myself more in the mood for a long slow drive with Ms. O’Connor. And it’s the strangest thing when you pick up an author like this masterful lady: you’re no longer driving: SHE is. And that’s what we readers are looking for. That’s how it “should” be.
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