If you're lost in the woods it pays to have a compass. You don't have to understand how the compass works, but you do have to understand what it's for and what direction to follow to get you back to the narrow road. If you don't have a compass, it is EXTREMELY challenging. If you don't have a well tuned sense of how to follow it, it is EXTREMELY challenging. If writing is a walk in the woods, then not only can we lead OURSELVES by a short route to danger, but we can lead *every soul reading us* by that same route. Evil is real, so it's important to treat it as real, and not like some mundane boring earthly emergent property of human behavior.
It is such a challenging line to walk, because of that knifes-edge nature of the beast. Some people have a bigger appetite for, lets say, the demonic. That has always scared me and scares me MORE now that I understand it better. So I avoid writing about it. Some people can write about it and handle it excellently--they are not WRONG to do so. Shaina Read made a point once that caution and reverence are like two sides of the same coin. Proceed slowly, with understanding, with awareness that you are confronting Grave Matter. So the watchword that I would suggest is *caution*. Be careful.
"every story makes a point, whether or not the author is aware"--I love this. A lot of times what-the-point-is is driven more by where the reader is than the author. Some lessons learned are not necessarily the lessons intended. So that's another reason to be cautious.
This is a good reflection and you've given me a lot to chew on!
Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts. Caution/reverence is an interesting concept especially in horror. Might be an interesting subject for the upcoming pod!
"What is the point you're making?" ...always a good question. As soon as you rephrase it as "What effect should this have on your reader," it can become a frightening one. Like Scoot says, the reader's got a soul too. Of course, the dream is to write something that goes out there and becomes real, somehow, but how much responsibility comes with that? That weight is a lot more clear in some areas than others - it's relatively easy to not write smut or incitements to murder. But at the edges, you get into large grey areas, and we can't assume that the reader has the same compass that we do.
Basically: readers, by consenting to spend time in the worlds we create, accept us as a moral authority in those worlds, and I think that people are too innately good at learning from stories to be able to set that aside when they put the story down. Maybe we don't accidentally convince anyone to become a serial killer, but we might convince someone that, in at least one case, (insert evil act here) was actually the right thing to do. This is an area where horror writers have the advantage - I'm thinking of what you wrote the other day, that horror is kind of like a fairy tale in the clarity of the moral pictures it can paint.
I am not a dark/horror writer. In fact, I think of my contributions to The Suff and Blackwater Project as "five o clock shadows" of the Macabre Multiverse out here.
However, your reflections are poignant for any Catholic writer. Our theology gives us great imaginative freedom, but with everything there is a careful responsibility that needs to be exercised.
Excellent post. You raise questions I struggle with all the time as I explore the darkness of the characters I’ve created in my serial. My planned story arcs toward some kind of resolution/redemption but to set that up there has to be a descent. Depicting these types of things is a challenge to someone with a conscience formed by faith.
Really appreciate your reflection here though I don’t see faith as essential for creative writers. I especially like your point about knowing what points you’re making, and strongly agree that avoiding certain issues is making a point. (The same can be said about politics and those who would claim to be apolitical, and about academics who try to be unbiased). However, when you write, “many artists (and university art teachers) encourage creatives to live in their pain. Pain exists, but seeking out darkness to draw out something physical (whether it be visual arts, creative writing, etc.) possesses a distinctly evil flavor” I think there needs to be more nuance and conversation. Is the intention to seek pain? I don’t know the environments you’ve been in, so I don’t know. But encouragement to “live in [your] pain” doesn’t sound to me as if one would have to seek it. It seems to me as though pain is an unfortunate universal reality of the world we live in. No need to seek it. It is there for its depths to be plumbed waiting for someone to brave the deep to see if there is another side (like Dante maybe). It is in that exploration that we find out what we should deem evil and what is inconsequential, what is good, and so on. Should we get lost like Israel in the desert others may follow our exploration of pain into a new place to form something better. You’ve said elsewhere that writing should not be done alone. I would add that it is always a collective experience between writers and readers. Channelling and exploring that pain creatively can be extraordinarily powerful and even transformative or transcendent both for artists and audiences. I don’t think I’m really arguing with you. I just thought that point was important and needed more.
I enjoyed this essay tremendously. I was raised Catholic, had a very encouraging Jesuit mentor who wanted me to enter Holy Orders, and had many fond memories of the ceremonial aspects of Church and of learning its rich and intellectual traditions growing up. However, I fell out of faith and renounced it after two decades of personal experiences and trauma (e.g. coming out after serving in the military, my brother’s unambiguous suicide and the way the Church handled it, etc.).
Being on Substack and sharing my fiction with friends and family members who are still Catholic has been an interesting experience. I routinely have Catholics subscribe to my page, only to have them unsbscribe within the space of about a week to a month. I have lost a few close friends because of the themes I write about. A nun who was one of my teachers in the mid-‘80s, sent me an email offline chastising me for specific character depictions, which she copied and pasted into the “break up” letter, and explained why she no longer felt no longer comfortable engaging with me, either on social media or in person, unless it were in a public setting. That was deflating and really depressing to me. A friend of mine from college sent a similar note before unsubscribing, telling me that he could not abide by my depictions of certain Catholic rites in my werewolf story. And so it goes. I feel deep down that there is a moral thread running through everything that I write, although that thread may be inconsistent or antithetical to the teachings of certain faiths or confessions.
I cannot hypnotize myself into believing things I no longer believe. And for all the problems some people have with me and/or my writing, I find it as equally objectionable when I encounter dyed-in-the-wool “sinners” (cads, flimflam men, gaslighters, substance abusers, liars, bigots), who have no problem “putting on piety” when it suits them but will clutch their pearls in mortal horror if someone so much as drops an F-bomb at a cocktail party. There are a lot of self-appointed arbiters of taste (whether they be academics or social media warriors) who are quite fond of issuing religious or ideological manifestos about what is acceptable or unacceptable in fiction and art. But when I read these, I feel like I’ve strayed into a Mad Hatter’s citadel of hypocrisy. Many of these views boil down to arguments of authority, with the “authority” quite often beginning and ending with the author who wrote said manifesto.
When I was growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Flannery O’Conner was recognized as a powerful but edgy Catholic writer, whose works raised many moral and ethical dilemmas that we all wrestle with and that were worth exploring. I took that literally, and read everything she wrote, including her collected letters (published in 1988 by The Library of America). I like her writing. BUT there are so many problematic aspects to it that seem to be continuously swept under the rug or interpreted in barmy ways and raise more questions than they answer.
For example “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (cited above) is certainly one of the most horrific short stories I’ve ever read. But to this day, no devout Catholic has been able to elucidate to me what exactly this powerful message about redemption is that we’re supposed to glean from its ending in which the serial killer has a family led into the woods one by one and executed. The grandmother pleads for their lives and is then shot at point blank range as well. I’ve been told, “We’re not meant to understand. It’s all part of the mystery.” It’s a shocking story, no doubt about it. But I’ve come across similar gritty depictions of evil in pulp writers like Ed McBain that are just as brutal and tragic, but in which the characters actually wrestle with what has happened and try to find some meaning in it and a way to go on. Also, the rampant racism throughout her tales (and letters, by the way) is unsettling, to say the least. That story alone begins with the grandmother in the back seat of the car bandying about one racial stereotype after another, as she uses slurs and points and laughs at the black children they drive by. It seems gratuitous and makes it difficult to disregard it by saying, “Well, that’s just the way things were at the time the author was writing.”
In closing, I want to mention her novella “The Violent Bear it Away” in order to pave the way for a thought experiment. The story is about a child pup-tent revivalist, who has to bury his abusive grandpa before heading out from the farm on his spiritual journey. The boy is abused by a drunken driver who picks him up along a dusty Mississippi road while the boy is hitchhiking. The boy doesn’t understand what has happened to him. At another point, the boy murders a mentally disabled boy, with the full knowledge of his father who is listening into the kid being murdered and heaves a sigh of relief as it is happening, because the child preacher has convinced him that he really didn’t want to have a mentally disabled son, and then proceeds to offer up several holy-rolling excuses as to why the mentally disabled son was born to his father in the first place. The reason I mention this novella is that I think it is salutary to dwell on the level of outrage a story like that would generate today among Catholic writers if someone who was not “the Catholic writer Flannery O’Conner” were to dare to publish it.
I read your comment yesterday and have been thinking on it. I didn't want to respond immediately as I believe it deserves a thoughtful response. I'm very sorry you had these experiences. I respect you and your decision to leave the church, but on the off-chance you ever reconsider, I pray that you find a community that is warm-spirited and welcoming. I'm definitely not equipped to address all of the points you've made (especially not in a tiny comment section).
In regard to Flannery O'Conner, however, I think that
-one, time allows us more bandwidth for reflection
-two, on "A Good Man is Hard to Find":
Personally, I don't believe that the victims/family in the story are supposed to represent the total opposite side of the coin. Through scenes of shocking violence, I believe O'Conner is making rather profound religious statements. We are supposed to identify with the Misfit as much as the family. The Grandmother is not a "good" character. This is highlighted through the prejudiced and cruelly indifferent statements she makes about the little boy on the side of the road. She talks too much without thinking, it's what gets her family killed.
Her purest moment was through the identification of the Misfit as "one of her babies". As the Misfit says, "she would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life". Further, there is equal possibility for redemption for both the Grandmother and the Misfit ("the meanest of them sparkled"). Again, there is a kinship between them. I believe that this is the "point" and a very Catholic one.
This is my point. The world is ugly and broken in many ways. Catholic perspective--especially in much of their dark fiction--is to present that and then open a path forward toward hidden grace.
> I’ve been told, “We’re not meant to understand. ..."
The author (O'Conner) definitely meant us to understand, though; her writing is on the whole intended to be something that humans can comprehend (whether they try to, or want to try, is a different matter of course, as is whether they succeed or make wrong guesses that bemused her). There are elements in these stories as you noted that outrage us on the surface (casual racism; violence; abuse; "I do not like any of these characters"), and then if we get past that there are conclusions that we don't want to draw about ourselves - so there are two levels of profound discomfort. If the second (deeper) level of profound discomfort is not intended to make the reader a better person (because of an author's desire to lift up the world to something greater and more *beautiful* than it is now, one reader at a time, though the path leads through hell and high water) then there is no justification for the existence of the writing. I agree that it is unhelpful either to gatekeep at the first level without considering further (arbiters of taste, etc), or to figuratively canonize an author and *not* grapple with the real tension between "this is awful stuff" and "has it made anyone a better person (and have I figured out how she intended it to make me a better person)" simply because it was written by a Big Name.
Thanks for this. It’s something I’m also trying to think through, as a Christian writer of fiction hoping to honour God in my writing. I especially appreciate your point about where our minds go when we’re constructing the worlds we’re writing
I love your reflection on this! I’ve been thinking about this recently, as I’m realizing that so many (so many!) of the fiction writers I follow because I enjoy and connect with their stories are Catholic. Maybe it’s something about Substack that has brought so many Catholic fiction writers to one place, or maybe there’s more at play, but either way it’s fascinating (and makes for great stories)!
I delve in darkness often, and it is good to ask why we do so and what are our goals. Like an adrenaline junky that must jump off cliffs to find her thrills, searching for the deepest darkest possibility is a creative task that powers and excites my neurons. It is not a jolt of enjoyment, but rather one of discovery. Because the path that leads to most unthinkable horrors is (thankfully) rarely taken. But even though it is not taken, that journey exist, and through fiction we can experience the creation of those ferocious emotions, while also suffering under the crushing weight of tragedy the darkness has brought. That dark forbidden place, the place no one wishes to ever go, shows us how precious good is and how fragile our psyche's can be. Can we truly even appreciate the light, if we don't know darkness?
If you're lost in the woods it pays to have a compass. You don't have to understand how the compass works, but you do have to understand what it's for and what direction to follow to get you back to the narrow road. If you don't have a compass, it is EXTREMELY challenging. If you don't have a well tuned sense of how to follow it, it is EXTREMELY challenging. If writing is a walk in the woods, then not only can we lead OURSELVES by a short route to danger, but we can lead *every soul reading us* by that same route. Evil is real, so it's important to treat it as real, and not like some mundane boring earthly emergent property of human behavior.
It is such a challenging line to walk, because of that knifes-edge nature of the beast. Some people have a bigger appetite for, lets say, the demonic. That has always scared me and scares me MORE now that I understand it better. So I avoid writing about it. Some people can write about it and handle it excellently--they are not WRONG to do so. Shaina Read made a point once that caution and reverence are like two sides of the same coin. Proceed slowly, with understanding, with awareness that you are confronting Grave Matter. So the watchword that I would suggest is *caution*. Be careful.
"every story makes a point, whether or not the author is aware"--I love this. A lot of times what-the-point-is is driven more by where the reader is than the author. Some lessons learned are not necessarily the lessons intended. So that's another reason to be cautious.
This is a good reflection and you've given me a lot to chew on!
Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts. Caution/reverence is an interesting concept especially in horror. Might be an interesting subject for the upcoming pod!
Writing about supernatural monsters never bothered me, but I have found that I don't like to write about certain human evils.
"What is the point you're making?" ...always a good question. As soon as you rephrase it as "What effect should this have on your reader," it can become a frightening one. Like Scoot says, the reader's got a soul too. Of course, the dream is to write something that goes out there and becomes real, somehow, but how much responsibility comes with that? That weight is a lot more clear in some areas than others - it's relatively easy to not write smut or incitements to murder. But at the edges, you get into large grey areas, and we can't assume that the reader has the same compass that we do.
Basically: readers, by consenting to spend time in the worlds we create, accept us as a moral authority in those worlds, and I think that people are too innately good at learning from stories to be able to set that aside when they put the story down. Maybe we don't accidentally convince anyone to become a serial killer, but we might convince someone that, in at least one case, (insert evil act here) was actually the right thing to do. This is an area where horror writers have the advantage - I'm thinking of what you wrote the other day, that horror is kind of like a fairy tale in the clarity of the moral pictures it can paint.
Wonderfully said and such an important point to make!
Heh, well, I wasn't always this conscientious! It definitely gives me pause for thought when I'm picking the point of view for a scene, at least.
I am not a dark/horror writer. In fact, I think of my contributions to The Suff and Blackwater Project as "five o clock shadows" of the Macabre Multiverse out here.
However, your reflections are poignant for any Catholic writer. Our theology gives us great imaginative freedom, but with everything there is a careful responsibility that needs to be exercised.
👏 well said!
Excellent post. You raise questions I struggle with all the time as I explore the darkness of the characters I’ve created in my serial. My planned story arcs toward some kind of resolution/redemption but to set that up there has to be a descent. Depicting these types of things is a challenge to someone with a conscience formed by faith.
Really appreciate your reflection here though I don’t see faith as essential for creative writers. I especially like your point about knowing what points you’re making, and strongly agree that avoiding certain issues is making a point. (The same can be said about politics and those who would claim to be apolitical, and about academics who try to be unbiased). However, when you write, “many artists (and university art teachers) encourage creatives to live in their pain. Pain exists, but seeking out darkness to draw out something physical (whether it be visual arts, creative writing, etc.) possesses a distinctly evil flavor” I think there needs to be more nuance and conversation. Is the intention to seek pain? I don’t know the environments you’ve been in, so I don’t know. But encouragement to “live in [your] pain” doesn’t sound to me as if one would have to seek it. It seems to me as though pain is an unfortunate universal reality of the world we live in. No need to seek it. It is there for its depths to be plumbed waiting for someone to brave the deep to see if there is another side (like Dante maybe). It is in that exploration that we find out what we should deem evil and what is inconsequential, what is good, and so on. Should we get lost like Israel in the desert others may follow our exploration of pain into a new place to form something better. You’ve said elsewhere that writing should not be done alone. I would add that it is always a collective experience between writers and readers. Channelling and exploring that pain creatively can be extraordinarily powerful and even transformative or transcendent both for artists and audiences. I don’t think I’m really arguing with you. I just thought that point was important and needed more.
Some good points here! Maybe I'll do a follow-up on this at some point in the future :)
I hope you do. You really got me thinking and I love that.
I enjoyed this essay tremendously. I was raised Catholic, had a very encouraging Jesuit mentor who wanted me to enter Holy Orders, and had many fond memories of the ceremonial aspects of Church and of learning its rich and intellectual traditions growing up. However, I fell out of faith and renounced it after two decades of personal experiences and trauma (e.g. coming out after serving in the military, my brother’s unambiguous suicide and the way the Church handled it, etc.).
Being on Substack and sharing my fiction with friends and family members who are still Catholic has been an interesting experience. I routinely have Catholics subscribe to my page, only to have them unsbscribe within the space of about a week to a month. I have lost a few close friends because of the themes I write about. A nun who was one of my teachers in the mid-‘80s, sent me an email offline chastising me for specific character depictions, which she copied and pasted into the “break up” letter, and explained why she no longer felt no longer comfortable engaging with me, either on social media or in person, unless it were in a public setting. That was deflating and really depressing to me. A friend of mine from college sent a similar note before unsubscribing, telling me that he could not abide by my depictions of certain Catholic rites in my werewolf story. And so it goes. I feel deep down that there is a moral thread running through everything that I write, although that thread may be inconsistent or antithetical to the teachings of certain faiths or confessions.
I cannot hypnotize myself into believing things I no longer believe. And for all the problems some people have with me and/or my writing, I find it as equally objectionable when I encounter dyed-in-the-wool “sinners” (cads, flimflam men, gaslighters, substance abusers, liars, bigots), who have no problem “putting on piety” when it suits them but will clutch their pearls in mortal horror if someone so much as drops an F-bomb at a cocktail party. There are a lot of self-appointed arbiters of taste (whether they be academics or social media warriors) who are quite fond of issuing religious or ideological manifestos about what is acceptable or unacceptable in fiction and art. But when I read these, I feel like I’ve strayed into a Mad Hatter’s citadel of hypocrisy. Many of these views boil down to arguments of authority, with the “authority” quite often beginning and ending with the author who wrote said manifesto.
When I was growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Flannery O’Conner was recognized as a powerful but edgy Catholic writer, whose works raised many moral and ethical dilemmas that we all wrestle with and that were worth exploring. I took that literally, and read everything she wrote, including her collected letters (published in 1988 by The Library of America). I like her writing. BUT there are so many problematic aspects to it that seem to be continuously swept under the rug or interpreted in barmy ways and raise more questions than they answer.
For example “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (cited above) is certainly one of the most horrific short stories I’ve ever read. But to this day, no devout Catholic has been able to elucidate to me what exactly this powerful message about redemption is that we’re supposed to glean from its ending in which the serial killer has a family led into the woods one by one and executed. The grandmother pleads for their lives and is then shot at point blank range as well. I’ve been told, “We’re not meant to understand. It’s all part of the mystery.” It’s a shocking story, no doubt about it. But I’ve come across similar gritty depictions of evil in pulp writers like Ed McBain that are just as brutal and tragic, but in which the characters actually wrestle with what has happened and try to find some meaning in it and a way to go on. Also, the rampant racism throughout her tales (and letters, by the way) is unsettling, to say the least. That story alone begins with the grandmother in the back seat of the car bandying about one racial stereotype after another, as she uses slurs and points and laughs at the black children they drive by. It seems gratuitous and makes it difficult to disregard it by saying, “Well, that’s just the way things were at the time the author was writing.”
In closing, I want to mention her novella “The Violent Bear it Away” in order to pave the way for a thought experiment. The story is about a child pup-tent revivalist, who has to bury his abusive grandpa before heading out from the farm on his spiritual journey. The boy is abused by a drunken driver who picks him up along a dusty Mississippi road while the boy is hitchhiking. The boy doesn’t understand what has happened to him. At another point, the boy murders a mentally disabled boy, with the full knowledge of his father who is listening into the kid being murdered and heaves a sigh of relief as it is happening, because the child preacher has convinced him that he really didn’t want to have a mentally disabled son, and then proceeds to offer up several holy-rolling excuses as to why the mentally disabled son was born to his father in the first place. The reason I mention this novella is that I think it is salutary to dwell on the level of outrage a story like that would generate today among Catholic writers if someone who was not “the Catholic writer Flannery O’Conner” were to dare to publish it.
I read your comment yesterday and have been thinking on it. I didn't want to respond immediately as I believe it deserves a thoughtful response. I'm very sorry you had these experiences. I respect you and your decision to leave the church, but on the off-chance you ever reconsider, I pray that you find a community that is warm-spirited and welcoming. I'm definitely not equipped to address all of the points you've made (especially not in a tiny comment section).
In regard to Flannery O'Conner, however, I think that
-one, time allows us more bandwidth for reflection
-two, on "A Good Man is Hard to Find":
Personally, I don't believe that the victims/family in the story are supposed to represent the total opposite side of the coin. Through scenes of shocking violence, I believe O'Conner is making rather profound religious statements. We are supposed to identify with the Misfit as much as the family. The Grandmother is not a "good" character. This is highlighted through the prejudiced and cruelly indifferent statements she makes about the little boy on the side of the road. She talks too much without thinking, it's what gets her family killed.
Her purest moment was through the identification of the Misfit as "one of her babies". As the Misfit says, "she would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life". Further, there is equal possibility for redemption for both the Grandmother and the Misfit ("the meanest of them sparkled"). Again, there is a kinship between them. I believe that this is the "point" and a very Catholic one.
This is my point. The world is ugly and broken in many ways. Catholic perspective--especially in much of their dark fiction--is to present that and then open a path forward toward hidden grace.
> I’ve been told, “We’re not meant to understand. ..."
The author (O'Conner) definitely meant us to understand, though; her writing is on the whole intended to be something that humans can comprehend (whether they try to, or want to try, is a different matter of course, as is whether they succeed or make wrong guesses that bemused her). There are elements in these stories as you noted that outrage us on the surface (casual racism; violence; abuse; "I do not like any of these characters"), and then if we get past that there are conclusions that we don't want to draw about ourselves - so there are two levels of profound discomfort. If the second (deeper) level of profound discomfort is not intended to make the reader a better person (because of an author's desire to lift up the world to something greater and more *beautiful* than it is now, one reader at a time, though the path leads through hell and high water) then there is no justification for the existence of the writing. I agree that it is unhelpful either to gatekeep at the first level without considering further (arbiters of taste, etc), or to figuratively canonize an author and *not* grapple with the real tension between "this is awful stuff" and "has it made anyone a better person (and have I figured out how she intended it to make me a better person)" simply because it was written by a Big Name.
Thanks for this. It’s something I’m also trying to think through, as a Christian writer of fiction hoping to honour God in my writing. I especially appreciate your point about where our minds go when we’re constructing the worlds we’re writing
I love your reflection on this! I’ve been thinking about this recently, as I’m realizing that so many (so many!) of the fiction writers I follow because I enjoy and connect with their stories are Catholic. Maybe it’s something about Substack that has brought so many Catholic fiction writers to one place, or maybe there’s more at play, but either way it’s fascinating (and makes for great stories)!
I delve in darkness often, and it is good to ask why we do so and what are our goals. Like an adrenaline junky that must jump off cliffs to find her thrills, searching for the deepest darkest possibility is a creative task that powers and excites my neurons. It is not a jolt of enjoyment, but rather one of discovery. Because the path that leads to most unthinkable horrors is (thankfully) rarely taken. But even though it is not taken, that journey exist, and through fiction we can experience the creation of those ferocious emotions, while also suffering under the crushing weight of tragedy the darkness has brought. That dark forbidden place, the place no one wishes to ever go, shows us how precious good is and how fragile our psyche's can be. Can we truly even appreciate the light, if we don't know darkness?