story
Knowing about a good story you haven’t read is like watching for a comet.
Letter to William Maxwell, Spring 1957, in What There Is to Say We Have Said, ed. by Suzanne Marrs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 110.
Stories, more even than stars or spectacle, are still the currency of life, or commercial entertainment, and look likely to last longer than the euro. There’s no escaping stories, or the pressures to tell them.
“Can Science Explain Why We Tell Stories?,” Page-Turner Blog, The New Yorker, May 18, 2012.
When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (New York: Grove Press, 2011), 8.
Today I got a letter from a man who said he had spent his childhood among characters such as I had portrayed. Poor man. He said since he had seen them in print they burdened his conscience less.
Letter to Catharine Carver dated August 10, 1955, in Letters of Flannery O’Connor: The Habit of Being (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 95. (Catherine Carver was O’Connor’s longtime editor at Harcourt Brace.)
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.
One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 14.
A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story.
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 96.
One January day when I was four, the au pair from Denmark who was helping out my parents while my sister was in the hospital took me for a walk in the woods. She’d been reading me the chapter in Winnie the Pooh where Pooh and Piglet go round and round the spinney in the snow, trying to catch the Woozle. “Let’s go and find Piglet,” she said. The Keele woods were under snow as well, that day. The snow was deep and powdery on the paths, and the trees were smoothed, white masses bowed under the weight of winter, like melted candles. We passed through a zone of little fir trees near the bottom of the steps down into the woods, leaving behind a trail of big footprints and a trail of little ones … And there, perched on the hollow stump of an oak, was Piglet, wearing a small red scarf exactly as in the pictures. The soft toy versions of the Disney characters did not exist yet. She had sewn him herself from gray and white cotton ticking. It was wonderful.
The Child That Books Built (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 61–62.
The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right.
The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (New York: Picador, 2006), 20–21.