A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

I don't think good men in life are hard to find. The title of this post is the title to a Flannery O'Connor short story, one of her best known ones, I believe.  O'Connor wrote a lot of Southern Gothic and this short story is Southern Gothic. I won't say more to avoid any spoiler alerts in case anyone reading decides to read the story. Get her work from your library. This short story, although not to my overall taste, is a stunner.

Once I took a writing class in which the instructor had everyone read The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. The instructor said it was a perfect short story. My daughter's Waldorf teacher had her class read it, maybe in the 7th grade so I read it. It is a horrible story. It may fit some writing academic's idea of the perfect short story but I wish I had not read it.  It's very gothic, not sure if it would be considered Southern Gothic.

Another writing instructor once had all his students read The Rocking Horse Winner by D. H. Lawrence as his idea of the perfect short story.  Notice how so many of my instructors were male -- I hate that and it is changing but women get published much less than men and, I fear, thus it will ever be.  I do not like The Rocking Horse Winner either, altho I concede it is brilliantly written. And I don't think, as my instructor insisted, that it had all the required elements of a good short story. In a good short story something has to happen in not many pages. The characters have to be introduced, the setting conveyed and then something happens that changes something about a character, their lives, their world. I don't think Rocking Horse Winner demonstrates any change in the child. And, it, too, creeped me out.

Hmm. I need to find some short stories I love.  Odd how so many of my writing instructors over the course of my life have picked short stories that I did not like. I can admire things in each of these stories I have mentioned. I very much admire Flannery O'Connor's seemingly effortless depiction of many characters in a few pages. And I admire how seemingly effortlessly she evokes the Deep South, country backroads, old cars (maybe not old in her time as she wrote?) and family dynamics. Man, that chick could write.  I have read that Ms. O'Connor labored painstakingly over everything she wrote to get it note perfect. To me, anything of hers I have read reads as if she wrote it in a genius flow state, as if the story flowed flawlessly in first draft. If painstakingly laboring over one's writing is the key to getting published and then selling well, I'm doomed. I hate to edit. Once I have written a first draft, my restless mind moves on to write about something else. Edit? Paintakingly labor over the phrasing of sentences? No way. I don't believe that great genius writers labored over their stuff. I don't believe Ms. O'Connor did. Oh, I believe she worked hard and cared deeply that her work was good, but I don't believe her work was great because she edited herself well. I believe genius flowed out of her, unstoppable.

The Lottery?  No thanks even if it was written by a chick writer. The Rocking Horse Winner might not be creepy to most but I quite dislike it.