Take heed, all you budding novelists — Flannery O’Connor has shown the way! Read all about it in O’Connor v. the Antichrist.
A few quotes from O’Connor taken from the essay:
“If you live today you breathe in nihilism. In or out of the Church, it’s the gas you breathe. If I hadn’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.”
In her most famous statement about her work, she explained that “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
“All my stories,” she wrote, “are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it.”
O’Connor once wrote that “more than ever now it seems that the kingdom of heaven has to be taken by violence, or not at all. You have to push as hard as the age that pushes against you.”
Check out the essay (or at least check out some of O’Connor’s books).