Flannery O’Connor on writing Christian fiction

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).