Flannery O'Connor, Writing and Running

I've been marveling at Flannery O'Connor's collection of essays/lectures Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Marveling and tearing my hair out, that is.

Here's a quote from one of O'Connor's essays on her own work:

I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity. The action or gesture I'm talking about would have to be on the anagogical level, that is, the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it. It would be a gesture that transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.

O'Connor goes on to show where such a gesture occurs in "A Good Man is Hard to Find," when the Grandmother faces the Misfit near the end of the story. What she says and does is the story. Without it, you have no story.

Maybe that's why it's taking me so long to finish the two short stories I'm currently working on. Either I don't know where the real heart of the stories lie or I don't know how to show it. I suspect the first problem with both stories, but even when I figure that out, I'm not sure how to conquer the second problem. Frustrating. But I believe O'Connor is right.

Last week's writing total was not huge, 12 hours. This week will be far less, mostly because of the problems mentioned above. But you keep on plugging away. (Some John Gardner exercises are helping me produce some pretty good potential first drafts.)

But I must say my running is going well. 10 miles yesterday on the B&A Trail. Not fast, not pretty, but 10 miles is 10 miles. My goal for next week is 11 miles. And to finish at least one of the two stories.