Discovering Yourself In and Through Your Writing

Just one question for this next writer roundtable.

Flannery O'Connor wrote, “I write to discover what I know" and “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

How has being a writer and telling stories helped you discover who you are and what you know?

Nikki Nelson-Hicks: Very interesting question. For me, some of my stories have helped me to touch on emotions that I didn't realize I had inside. Very much poking a blister and letting some stuff ooze out. I have also enjoyed creating characters who have the bravery I wish I had. That's also very insightful.

Jessica Nettles: Being a writer as a kid helped me embrace my differences from the other kids at school. It gave me a space where it didn’t matter that I was the youngest or the smallest or weird. It was the first thing I felt confident was mine.

As an adult, it helped me rediscover myself after a really shitty marriage in my twenties. I found this spooky girl in the middle of the debris who needed to explore the darkness, my darkness. I learned my dark parts were okay and just as important as being good. I love that spooky, magic-loving girl. I learned that I have a voice that people actually enjoy (still shocked by this) and that I’m funny. Mostly, I learned that writing is who I am. I do many things, but at my core, I am my words. That’s my magic.

Lainey Kennedy: Writing has helped me explore the human conditions by creating characters that are both over the top but rooted in little bits of everyone I know. The adventures are the escapism, but the characters are what I know.

Fay Shlanda: My writing has helped me a lot as a person. I write poetry about my relationship with the world around me, which is mostly about mental illness and being broken.

I have discovered that I have much to say on the subject and that overcoming my hardships is something I would not trade in for an easier life. They have shaped me into someone I like and I use my knowledge to help others.

October Santerelli: I wanted to be a writer as soon as I heard it was a job you could have. I was in 7th grade, and I went home that night and told my parents that was what I wanted to do. And after that, writing became a lifeline, a way to express what I couldn't say, feelings I didn't even know I had. Writing helped me understand myself, like holding up a mirror and seeing with fresh eyes.

What I Learned from Dead People (Mostly)

No. This isn't a post about me whipping out a Ouija board and contacting the dead, no matter how much I love ghost and horror stories. 

It's just that the bulk of my favorite writers tend to be of the "late" variety. I'm one of the oddball readers who doesn't just call a writer a favorite only because I like their work, but instead they become a favorite more because I learn something from them. I become a better writer because I read them. They influence, nay, infect me with their work. 

That said, I'm really working hard at discovering more living writers who have something to say to me about the craft -- something that isn't just a rehash of the lessons from the already dead folks. (Sure, call me a snob. I've earned it.)

Ernest Hemingway

Papa re-taught me how to write. I totally ignored Hemingway in high school when we read "Indian Camp" and "Hills Like White Elephants," but when I discovered him again in college and tackled books like The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, I actually paid attention. 

What I had thought was boring in high school, I later appreciated as direct, succinct, non-flowery. And I loved it. Then, when I took a class on short stories and revisited the Nick Adams stories (and Hills Like White Elephants), I realized I was seated at the foot of a master craftsman in the art of dialogue. He was the first writer I found who let people talk around the things they wanted to say instead of talk about them. 

And that is a lightbulb moment that has followed me in my writing ever since.

Zora Neale Hurston

Woman have the most important keys of all, according to Zora Neal Hurston, in her collected folk tales Men and Mules. Those are the keys to everything that drives a man to want for himself, the kitchen and the bedroom, food and sex, his belly and his, well, you know. 

Hurston never shied away from the truth of her world. Women didn't have the power they deserved. They were treated like second-class citizens, and if one was a black woman, it was closer to third-class, right behind black men. Still, she knew the power and pride and ability she owned as an African-American woman, and those things permeated her works. Their Eyes Were Watching God, even if divorced from her full body of work, shows the life of a woman who was willing to every tool at her disposal to live life on her own terms and to achieve personal freedom, even if she had to move from man to man to man to no man in order to do it. 

In short, Zora taught me about how who I am and where I am as a writer influence me. Those things make me the way I am. They contribute to my beliefs and my character and my ideals. And there's no reason to shy away from them just because I'm telling a story. Let them flow. Chase the things I believe in and trust the story to find others who believe in them too. 

Ray Bradbury

I can write whatever the hell I want. That's the lesson I learned from Ray Bradbury. 

Do I want to write a collection of science fiction stories? Then do it. Do I want to write a mosaic novel about growing up in a small town? Then do it. Or maybe a sci-fi pseudo-novel told in short stories? Go ahead. Time's a wastin'. How 'bout a horror novel? Sure. Go right ahead. 

Don't let the machine pigeonhole you. Pay no attention to the genre markers that tell you "Thou shalt not pass." The whole of the world of storytelling is your plaything. 

There are no areas of the map you can't travel to. And there's nothing the machine or the marketing department can do to stop you. 

Envy and Imitation

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at
the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide;
that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion;
that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel or
nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed
on that plot of ground which is given to him to till."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

It's okay. Every writer does it. I do it. You do it. The best-sellers do it. The indie savants do it. 

We tend to ape -- sometimes unintentionally, sometimes on purpose -- our favorite writers and pick up on the traits we enjoy about their work. 

When I started writing, I was determined to be the next C.S. Lewis. Not the Narnia Lewis but the Space Trilogy and the Till We Have Faces Lewis. Because of that, my writing was overblown and way too wordy. And I also sounded British--using British turns of phrase and UK slang. Don't take my word for it. You can trust the fine folks at The New Yorker and The Missouri Review, who both told me the same thing. I still have both rejection letters in a binder with other memories from my writer's journey. 

When I started my Bachelor's classes in Literature, I found out how much I loved the novels and short stories of a certain boisterous and burly man-baby named Hemingway. So I moved on from the verbose intelligence and heavy vocabulary of C.S. Lewis for the clean, crisp, succinct prose of Papa Hemingway. 

The trouble was that I was still playing the imitation game. 

Only something was changing, something I wasn't even aware of.

Every Man's Education

After Hemingway, I went down the 20th Century American Literature rabbit hole. There was Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes (yes, stories not just poetry), and Shirley Jackson. As their ideas and styles added to what I had learned to apply from Papa, I noticed my way of writing changed significantly. I retained my love for simple sentences and direct nouns and verbs without lots of adverbs and adjectives, but I turned away from trying to be so "Literary" and embraced the "Southern" of my youth. 

And so began my phase of "Southern Literary" where I found the themes of Welty, O'Connor, Hurton, etc. weaving into my fiction. However, the voice was always changing from the Lewis/Hemingway copycat to something new that blended bits and bobs from lots of influences. 

It was during this time that I wrote for the award-winning Cyber Age Adventures. Being a literary writer, you can imagine the fun I had crafting superhero stories with my lens of literary impact and import. Somehow, it worked. Between Frank Fradella's RPG-inspired adventure yarn set in real-world physics and repercussions, Tom Waltz's quasi-military approach, and my focus of American Literature, we created something unique and engaging in the world of superhero fiction. 

But my inspiration still had some growth to come. 

Imagine the confusion and prosaic mush created when I started exploring for work of the great pulp and pulp-adjacent writers as I tried my hand at some New Pulp Fiction stories thanks to some introductions by friends like Bobby Nash. To do my homework at writing pulpy tales, I dug into the stories (both novels and short stories) of folks like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, among others. 

With these new influences, my style took another shift. The simple prose of Hemingway was still similar to the simple, direct prose of Chandler, but the types of stories were suddenly allowed to become a lot more, well, more exciting physically and emotionally rather than just the intellectual excitement of my Literary focus.

This began a new phase of what Derrick Ferguson and I often called Literary Pulp. For us, that meant deeper than mere surface characterization, dialogue that does more than just advance the plot, and looking for real-world interactions that didn't sugarcoat the time periods we were writing about. For me, it was just a continuation of what I had been doing since discovering Lewis and Hemingway. Lewis made me want to deal with spiritual and philosophical topics in genre fiction. Hemingway made me want to create characters who, when they spoke about a topic or when they avoided a topic, revealed a lot about who they were. Same uniform, just a different ballfield.

Nourishing Corn on My Own Plot of Ground

Okay. So what did I learn through that journey toward becoming Sean Taylor, the writer? Are there lessons that can help other writers push through their own journeys from imitation to what Emerson called "self-reliance"?

Sure. If you know me at all, you already know I love both tutorials and lists, and when I get to put them together in a single article, I'm suddenly the happiest little clam in the world. 

So here goes...

1. Embrace your idols. 

It's okay to be inspired to imitate. We learn by copying the works of those we enjoy reading. Their stories teach us about story structure, how to write dialog, when to break grammar rules -- all those wonderful techniques that ultimately fill up our writing toolkit and become what we call a personal style and voice. 

Take those inspirations. Work with them. Play with them. Turn them upside down and inside out. Put your own spin on them. Play with all your favorite toys. 

2. There can't only be one. 

Now, here's the trick, isn't it? This is your journey to discovering who you are as a writer, not a rehash of the movie Highlander. 

Imitating a single writer makes you a copycat. Imitation several at once makes you a dedicated learner of the craft. The more you learn from multiple writers, the more you integrate seemingly disparate voices into your own work, and that makes you become unique. Even if you use all the same ingredients, you bake your pie from a different recipe. 

3. Start purging. 

There will be lots of tidbits and style doodads that you find no longer work for you the more comfortable you become in your own writer "skin." That's all part of learning. What doesn't work anymore, excise it. Purge it like last month's leftovers. Eventually, you are left with the style stuff that makes you happy and makes you, well, you. 

Just like I left behind the British-isms of Lewis, you may need to cull the standard adventure motif of Tolkein or Donaldson's ten pages of how brown the mountains and tunnels were. You may need to cull the reliance on the internal monologue you copied from Faulkner. You may need to ditch the sudden shifts in verb tense and -person you picked up from Ed McBain. They may have gotten you to where you are, but they no longer suit you.

4. Good writers borrow. Great writers steal. 

This quote is usually attributed to the poet T.S. Eliot and it is often quoted along with a variation on it by Aaron Sorkin: “Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.” Regardless of who said it when and how, it's absolutely true. 

Beginning writers obsess about how much their work may remind them of the folks they admire. Great and practiced writers stop caring after a while. In fact, it's safe to say that all those things you think you will be called out for copying won't even register with most readers. Sure, there will always be reviewers who are paid to make both fair and unfair comparisons, but those are your typical readers. 

Steal proudly. Steal broadly. Steal without any discrimination. Do you like the way Eudora Welty writes winter scenes? Fine. Take it and shove it in your toolkit. Really dig the way Chandler can chop dialogue into snappy fragments? Chisel it right out of his book and hang onto it for your next story. 

New in Nature

Now, before you look at that list above and start to craft a plan, stop. Those aren't steps in a printout from Mapquest in 2006. You don't aim for step one and then turn off Highway 20 onto step two like it's some kind of organized plan. 

What is it then?

It's a synopsis of what happens to us as writers. It's a description of the process more than an outline to follow. It's something organic, not ordained. Something passive, not planned. 

It's one thing to be aware of it and acknowledge it and not let it consume you with imposter syndrome. But it's another thing entirely to see it as a roadmap for your writing goals. That shift in thinking is both subtle and crucial. 

The next line in the Emerson quote that started this essay is this: 

The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Ultimately it comes down to this: TRY.

Enjoy what you enjoy and let it shape you as a writer. Read, consume, mulch it in your mind, turn it into brain food, rinse and repeat. It's really as simple and as complicated as that. 

Bono and Flannery: Harder to Believe Than Go Crazy Tonight

"It's not a hill, it's a mountain as you start out the climb..." 

― U2, "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight"

“I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those
who want to believe. ... It is much harder to believe than not to believe." 

― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

At first glance, these quotes don't really seem to have anything to do with each other. One is pop psychology from "the world's most popular band" (or used to be anyway). The other is a quote about religion (particularly her own Catholicism) by perhaps the greatest Southern fiction writer to have ever lived.

But, with a little spackle and some good ol' fashioned chiseling around the edges, I think I can force-fit them easily into a discussion about writing and writers and imposter syndrome and feeling like a failure. 

As You Start Out the Climb

Everybody starts somewhere. No. Wait. Let's personalize that a bit. All writers start somewhere. Maybe it's a little bit of raw talent. Maybe it's enough interest to learn a little bit of technique. Or maybe it's blind, unfocused determination spent with a blank screen and a blinking cursor or an empty, yellow, lined sheet of paper on a legal pad. But it is indeed somewhere. It's a place, a starting block, a line that indicates go. 

There are quite a few of these places common to beginning (and established writers).

• I will write 300 words every day. 
• I will read at least one chapter of a book every day. 
• I will write one short story each month/week/etc.
• I will write a novel for NaNoWriMo this year. 

The first few days are exciting, but then somehow all that magic you expected to keep feeling turns into real work. Wouldn't it be more healthy to go for a run instead of wasting this afternoon at the computer? Wouldn't it be more inspiring to watch that new Marvel movie instead of churning out my 300 words today? It's okay. You can miss one. 

And you can. There are no rules in this game after all -- except the ones you set for yourself. 

But, rules or not, guilt rears its glaring face and it stares at you. It shouts all those words you already know too well. Failure. Hack. Imposter. Not a real writer. Not good enough. Not dedicated enough. 

All that progress uphill gets sidetracked. 

It's a new year and as usual, lots of folks resolve to get healthy, so let's look there for our comparison. You decide to start running four times a week. Good for you. Well done. Let's go. 

Only, you're not in the kind of shape yet to run as far as you want to yet maybe. Perhaps you're already wheezing after the first half mile and your calves are burning. 

It's not a hill. It's a mountain. 

One day you'll be able to run that mountain, but you've got to learn to get comfortable on it first. The more practiced you become, the more that mountain becomes a hill instead. But it always starts the same -- a massive, freakin' mountain! There's just no getting around that, no matter what you might be promised by a writing course in a Facebook ad. 

Sadly, this doesn't just apply to new writers. It also hits home for seasoned writers getting back in after a break from regular writing. Maybe a new full-time job sidelined your regular hours for spinning words into stories. Maybe you've been sick for a few weeks. Maybe you're dealing with family drama. Maybe you just didn't feel the urge to write like you used to and needed to take a break. Whatever the reason, it is all okay. Totally hunky dory. Muy bien. Mucho bueno. Molta bella.  

Because you may have been writing for years, you figure it should be easy to jump back on that horse (I love a good horsey cliche) and be back at full efficiency and writing prowess. 

But, the page stays blank. The cursor blinks at you like an empty promise. 

Where the hell did the damn words go?

Your hill turned back into a mountain. Put simply, you got out of practice. Yes, that quickly. 

But that is easily remedied. Simply start over. Build back up the stamina. Turn that mountain back into a hill. 

As long as it takes. 

Harder to Believe (In Yourself) Than Not To

What's the biggest killer for your drive to write?

No. Don't buy into the lie that it's this imaginary monster called Writer's Block. It doesn't exist. There's always something real lying beneath the surface of that fairy tale villain. Could be family troubles. Could be health issues. Could be stress. Could be work conflicts.

The trick is to know the root cause and not just call it Writers Block and try to fight something that isn't real. Fight the real issue. 

But enough of that rabbit trail. Back to the question. 

What's the biggest killer for your drive to write?

It's doubt. Yes. Doubt. 

It can come with several targets. You doubt your ability to get anything done in the time allotted or available. You doubt your readers will still be there from your last story. You doubt your very abilities since you haven't exercised them for so long. Or as a new writer you may doubt that you have any talent at all and have just been fooling yourself. 

Stop. Ask yourself a few questions.

• Have you written before? Then you can do it again. 
• Have you studied and practiced the skills needed to write? Then it's time to do the legwork to go along with that study. 
• Do you only have a limited amount of time to work on your writing? Then use it. Limited doesn't give you an excuse to just skip it entirely. 
• Did folks enjoy your work before? Chances are they still will. It just might take a little work to let them know you're back. 

For me, at least, all it takes to remind myself that I've done this before, and even if I have to start over a little further back on the mountain than I was when I left, I've done this all before and I can do it again. 

I can't speak for you. But I'm willing to bet you probably have reminders you hand on to for getting back up on that proverbial horse too. 

For new writers without a reference point of publishing or seeing a story finished, getting over that initial doubt can be a bit tougher, but with great practice comes great respons-- wait, wrong movie.

With continued practice comes a mighty piece of the Tonka trunk fleet to whittle that mountain down to a hill. All you have to do is keep at it. 

Flannery was right. It can be harder to believe it's possible than to doubt, but Flannery also knew that continued pressing on conquers doubts. 

So, get to writing. You got this.

Movie Reviews for Writers: Flannery

 

Flannery O'Connor is not only one of my favorite writers, but she's also the subject of a PBS documentary named after her. Known as perhaps the Grand Dame of Southern Fiction, O'Connor is THE voice to be reckoned with in the world of fiction seen through the eyes of the South.

 

But she wasn't what she seemed, neither a Southern lady nor a rebellious feminist. In fact, according to Conan O'Brien, discussing her and her work in an interview: "You think it's this bitter, old alcoholic who's writing these really funny dark stories, and then you find out she's a woman and that she's devoutly religious." Her work and her life didn't always line up with straight edges. There was overlap, and there were gaps where they didn't quite join up like they should. 

But to limit her to merely a Southern writer, as Harvey Breit says, isn't fair to her legacy:

I for myself think that although Ms. O'Connor can be called a Southern writer, I agree that she's not a Southern writer, just as Faulkner isn't, and that they are, for want of a better term, universal writers. 

They're writing about all mankind and about relationships and the mystery of relationships.

To Flannery, that universal mystery she was writing about had a lot to do with craziness, according to Alice Walker:

She was able to go straight to the craziness without always trying to make the craziness black or the craziness white.

She just saw the mystery of the craziness.

Like any good and gifted writer, she embraced that craziness and darkness and humor within her. She embraced all of herself, the dark and the light, and that's what made her fiction stand out. Says Richard Rodriquez: "What's happening here is something so remarkable that the profane meets with the sacred, and it's within that comic meeting that the stories operate."

It's a place many writers don't reach for a long time, having to first discover who they are through their writing first. Hell, some writers never get there. They may hide one part while focusing on what they think readers want to read. They may hide all of themselves and chase markets. But all truly talented writers eventually learn that your best work doesn't happen, can't happen until a person's fiction integrates all the parts of the one doing the writing.

It's the clips from during her life that make this documentary so much fun. One stand-out moment comes from a television show in which she is asked to talk about the art of short stories.

Breit: What does a writer try to do in a short story? Or what does a writer try to do in a novel? What is the secret of writing? 

O'Connor: Well, I think that a serious fiction writer describes an action only in order to reveal a mystery. Of course, he may be revealing the mystery to himself at the same time that he's revealing it to everyone else. And he may not even succeed in revealing it to himself, but I think he must sense its presence.

As a writer who prefers short stories to any other literary form, both for reading and writing, i think she's dead-on in her assessment. But I don't think it only applies to "serious" fiction writers. I think all writers have a subconscious writer living inside their heads that works that kind of thing into even so-called popular fiction or genre fiction. I tend to believe it's the kind of thing a writer can't avoid ultimately. 

Throughout the last years of her life, having been diagnosed with Lupis, the same uncurable disease that killed her father, the "all of her" that made up her life got progressively darker. However, that only reinforced her will to write, to create, to tell stories. According to Hilton Als, "I think she loved writing so much because it freed her from the corporeal." Writing was her escape from pain being tapped by her body. Creating was her winged bird (thank you, Langston Hughes) that was free to fly her imagination beyond her diagnosis. Telling stories was her way of travelling the world since her weakened body wouldn't allow that dream to come to fruition. 

The documentary spends quite a lot of its run time on her time writing Wise Blood (my favorite of her two novels). Her first novel, it was important to her to get it right, to capture her darkly comic intersection of realism, grotesque, and religious. In fact, according to Michael Fitzgerald, she ended up going back to rewrite from the beginning after reading and being so taken by Oedipus Rex. Says Michael: "She was so shocked by the Oedipus Rex that she reworked the entire novel to accommodate Hazel Motes' blinding himself, as Oedipus does."

In a discussion between Robert Giroux and Sally Fitzgerald, the two share this exchange about how her own thoughts on Wise Blood and those of her publishers and the reviewers didn't mesh. 

Fitzgerald: I think you can see in her letters about working on Wise Blood and the process that she went through, her first publisher who didn't get it. 

Giroux: Flannery said that, 'The editor at Holt treats me like a dim-witted campfire girl.'

Fitzgerald: He called her prematurely arrogant.

Gooch: And O'Connor, very young, I mean, completely stands up for herself and the possibility that this book will never be published and just says that, 'I'm not writing this kind of novel.'

Fitzgerald: Publishers never intimidated her.

Mary Steenburgen (reading from O'Connor's journal): I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or the aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.

This isn't uncommon. Our intentions as writers and what readers and (worse) reviewers read can be polar opposites. The ladies of her Southern small-town life saw the book as vulgar and actively irreligious, failing to notice the ragged shadow that followed Hazel Motes around with every step and wouldn't let him get away from faith no matter how he tried. Others simply saw some of her dialog as "proof" of her own racist beliefs and wondered how a sweet Southern lady would write such things into the mouths of her characters. 

Some of the fault in that misunderstanding, according to Richard Rodriquez, comes from O'Connor's immense talent as a dialog writer and her ability to capture voice even in internal monologue.

Part of my worry as her reader is that she's too good, by which I mean that her mimicry of her voices around her is too acute.

In that accuracy, she doomed herself, because a lot of these stories are judged by modern readers as unacceptable.

Still, even with ticks against her, Flannery O'Connor's legacy is secure. I don't see "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" or "Everything That Rises Must Converge" disappearing from textbooks or bookshelves of voracious readers any time soon. Perhaps this quote from William Sessions best sums up her writing life:

The life of Flannery O'Connor and what she had to offer, in terms of her relationship to the greater mysteries of existence, are going to be things that people will tap into, because they aren't going away.

God, how'd I love for someone to honestly say that about my work one day. 

Motivational Monday: A Lesson from Flannery O'Connor

Reading Short Stories for Beginners -- A Primer and List of Required Collections

by Sean Taylor

So, you're not really a short story reader. You've been reading your Summer novels for a while now, and you'd like to see why I'm so gung ho about short stories. That's cool. It's okay. I can help you with that.

Well, if you're a regular reader here on the blog, you'll know that I'm a huge fan of short stories and that they are, in fact, my favorite medium for writing and reading prose. I simply love the art required for short fiction.

How to read a short story collection

Step one -- open to the table of contents.
Step two -- read the list of titles.
Step three -- pick one that sounds interesting.

That's right. Totally ignore those 1s, 2s, and 3s in the "chapter" numbers. They don't matter anymore, not one bit.

That feeling you're getting giddy and euphoric on... that's called freedom. You're no longer bound to follow the order the sections appear between the covers. Read the end first. Read the beginning last. Read from the middle out. Jump around from story to story. Pop around like popcorn (the old Jiffy Pop stuff, not microwave). Read all the short ones first. Read all the long ones first. You do you. There are no rules.

Step four -- if you're not enjoying the stories you've read, close the book and pick up a different collection.

Whoa, now... Don't get crazy. Once you start reading you have to finish all the pages, right? Nope. That's the beauty of short stories.

Also, if you don't have time to read a novel per week or month or whatever timeframe you assign yourself, then just jump around with several collections of stories. You feel like you're cheating on your "main read" because there is no main read. Not this time.

See? That's true freedom, baby. Drink it deep. Breathe in it. Roll around and get it all over your jeans. It's okay.

Okay, so where do you start?

Well, here's my list of single-author short story collections to get you started. I mean, if you want to read, then you want to read the best. Right?

The Ways of White Folks is perhaps the finest volume of stories from the post-slavery United States. Each tale relates the culture shock when blacks and whites try to co-exist in a word that won't let them without shying away from the implications. But best of all, Hughes tells his stories with the ear of a poet, making each tale a feast for the ears and eyes.

This forgotten volume is the work of an older world, but the creepiness of these stories can't be denied. If you've ever wondered how horror without gore could still creep you the hell out, then you need to read this book. Modern horror writers would do well to rediscover this one and take its lessons on the art of horror to heart.

Most readers will know Ed McBain from his Matthew Hope and 87th Precinct novels, but even so, it would do you well to look up this collection of early stories from the master of the police procedural. These are the stories that made McBain the writer he became.

Eudora Welty is another of the masters of Southern Fiction. The people she writes about are as real as anyone you've ever met south of the Mason Dixon Line (or above it, for that matter). Welty has a sense of storytelling that comes across like a folk historian.

This one is worth the price of the book for "Harrison Bergeron" alone, but don't be fooled -- Vonnegut's no one-trick pony. He's perhaps the master satirist of the 20th Century, and his characters will stick in your brain long after you put the book down. If you like your fiction with a touch of the absurd, Vonnegut's your writer, hands down.

While The Great Gatsby may be considered by many as the quintessential Great American Novel, Fitzgerald is also a craftsman of the highest caliber when it comes to short stories. Nobody captures the fun, craziness, and self-indulgence of the 1920s better. But unlike lots of period pieces, Fitzgerald's tales aren't stuck in the past. They still ring true for modern readers.

What can out-Lovecraft the great H.P. himself? Well, The King in Yellow can. Based on an unrevealed play of the same name that can cause madness when read or performed, the stories in this book will stick with you for a long, long time, particularly those from the opening pages. Chemicals that turn people to stone, ghastly stalkers, creepy painters -- it's all here.

Almost everybody knows "The Lottery," but few could name her other stories by name. And that's a shame. Jackson knows her craft, particularly as it relates to making a reader care about slightly odd and broken people who exist just off the edge or normal.

This is the first of Bradbury's collections on this list, and I'm not apologizing. This volume is a bit of a departure from the average short story collection because the stories weave in and out of the lives of a town experiencing the seasons. One of the first to combine the novel with the short story effectively, Dandelion Wine is a must-read for any serious reader of short stories.

Pinning down just one volume from Flannery O'Connor is a difficult thing to do for a list. She has a knack for creating some of the most memorable characters in 20th Century fiction, all pulled from the Southen Gothic way she saw the world and incorporated it into her fiction. Nobody else could have created such a "good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

No list of short story collections is complete without Hemingway. He's the guy who defined the concept of literary short. All the classic stuff you either love or hate about Hemingway is here -- the talking around things, the "what the hell is actually going on here," and the to-the-point prose that sticks to the who, what, where, how, and why that he masters during his time as a newspaper writer. There's a reason Hemingway is considered the master of the form.

Nobody, and I mean nobody tells a short story like Ray Bradbury. He's the pinnacle of the artform, and this is his finest work, particularly the title story about a time traveler who faked it to change the world for the better.

Few contemporary writers can sell short stories like Neil Gaiman. Including some essays, this isn't only a short story collection, but it does contain some of his best fantasy shorts that have redefined the genre and pulled it away from the Tolkienesque.

In my opinion, Stephen King is an okay novelist but a damn fine short stories writer. Where he misfires on his novel endings, he has the luxury of not having them in his short stories. In medias res is the norm here. These quick bites of horror and terror are King at his best. (After this one, then read Just After Sunset, his second-best collection.)

One of the best sci-fi collections ever. Kilworth tinges his sci-fi with both horror (the title story) and satire (as well as anything by Vonnegut). This is an often neglected or forgotten work well worth looking for.

Raymond Chandler may be a novelist of the finest quality, but if you haven't read his pulpy shorts, you're missing the full picture. This is adventure writing at its finest. Nobody turns murder and theft into art like Chander. Period.

If Raymond Chandler wrote about relationships falling apart instead of murder, he'd write this book. Take the terse, straightforward style of the pulps and add a few literary techniques like characterization and talking around things instead of about them, and you have this book, one of the finest short story collections ever, and well worth your time.

Garcia Marquez is best known for being part of a literary style/genre called magical realism. Basically that means the mundanely normal and the weird and supernatural (but not too much) sit side by side. This is one of my favorite types of stories, and "Eva Is Inside Her Cat" and "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" (two of the best examples) are in this collection. Garcia Marquez is perhaps one of the biggest influences on my superhero fiction (and it's pretty evident in my story "The Other, As Just As Fair").

Your Turn

That's it for me. What are your favorite short story collections?

#MotivationalMonday (Flannery O'Connor)

GEORGIA LITERARY FESTIVAL 2013 PANEL SCHEDULE

Just a reminder that The Ruby Files writers and creators Bobby Nash and Sean Taylor join Van Allen Plexico, Andrea Judy, Barry Reese, and more at the 2013 Georgia Literary Festival, which is being held on November 9 - 10, 2013 in Milledgeville, GA. Panels take place on Saturday, November 9th. Click on the panel schedule grid above for a larger view.

You can learn more about this amazing event here and here.

We hope to see you there.

Preach It, Sister Flannery!

"The writer can choose what he writes about, but he cannot choose what he is able to make live." 

~ Flannery O'Connor

Part of my "Sean shelf"

A Facebook friend sent this as a comment on a recent discussion (http://seanhtaylor.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-writer-will-take-your-questions-now_16.html) and I have to admit that the truth of this quote really hit me. It's completely beside the point that I'm a huge fan of Flannery O'Connor however. No, really, it has no bearing on it. (Okay, methinks I doth protest too much.)

Anyway, it hit me again as a strong reminder that as writers, we have no control over what actually sticks with readers and what falls by the wayside. Will it be our Holy the Firm or our Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, our As I Lay Dying or our "Rose for Emily"? Will it be the work that makes us look like the best of all saints or the one that makes us look like the worst of all possible sinners?

We simply can't make that decision for our readers. They make it for us. 

As I look back on my own work,is there anything I'm not proud of in the sense that I regret what it says about me? No. Not even the Dominatrix book for Gene Simmons. I'd do it all over again. That book speaks truth. It does. It tells of the emptiness of a person who is driven like the preacher of Ecclesiastes to pursue a path that ultimately ends in vanity and nothing. It doesn't hold back, but it speaks truth.

My pulp work? Nope. Nothing there either. Those tales are filled with sacrificial action and folks risking their lives for others, trying to do the better thing, even when such a course of action is unclear.

So regardless of what sticks, if any of my work even does, I stand ready.

As such, it's important to me that I write what I believe I'm called to write. That I follow the dictates of Scripture to the best of my understanding and the teaching of the spirit of God. That I listen to the still small voice prompting me toward this and away from that. That I remain a true example of being not just who I am in Christ, but who I am period, not putting on airs or writing for a pre-fab submarket so I can be a best-seller by preaching to the choir and not ruffling pharisaic feathers, neither hiding my light under a bushel nor trying to sneak in "spiritual stuff" to fool "the lost" into reading it and suddenly saying the magic prayer.

In short, I have keep walking that straight, narrow line that gets hard to see sometimes and be a fallen man saved by grace through faith telling stories that I hope come from the kind of heart that says something that causes people to pick up some truth to ponder as they read. And if they can get even a little bit of truth from me and my stories, then hopefully, they'll keep reading and find out that old saying about the truth is actually, well, true... the Truth will set you free.

The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now (#240) -- Writers Read Writers

Which writers would you most recommend for 

other writers to read to strengthen their own writing?

Every writer I know will have different responses for this, but the writers who most inspire and teach me the craft are:

 
1. Ernest Hemingway

 
2. Ed McBain


3. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

 
4. Gabriel Garcia Marquez

 
5. Annie Dillard


6. Ray Bradbury

7. Christa Faust


8, Langston Hughes


9. Flannery O'Connor


10. Richard Hugo