Flannery O'Connor Kept It Real
And she didn't have much with truck with authors who didn't (Blog Post)
Flannery liked to get in the dirt. Mud, blood, vulgarity. She kept it real and insisted every author do the same, at least if they were writing fiction.
No Cartesian, she. A fierce sacramental approach to reality was in her Savannahian bones. Stories, she explained with the exasperation of a dad who can't understand why his kid can't get the knack of riding a bike, must be sacramental. Soil. That's where stories start; then they grow like plants and flower. You gotta keep it all real. If you showed her a story that made a great intellectual point, she'd wipe with it.
"It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object that they actually see. But the world of the fiction writer is full of matter, and this is what the beginning fiction writers are loath to create. They are concerned primarily with unfleshed ideas and emotions. They are apt to be reformers and to want to write because they are possessed not by a story but by the bare bones of some abstract notion. They are conscious of problems, not of people, of questions and issues, not of the texture of existence, of case histories and of everything that has a sociological smack, instead of with all those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth." Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (Noonday Press, 1999), pp. 67-68.