Origins of a Story

Q. How does a story come into being? Do you create it or does it create you? Do you think there's a danger of a writer's exhausting his material?

A. I don't know that I could really say how a story comes into being. I suppose it's about fifty-fifty as to whether you create it or it creates you. If it's a good story, it's as much a revelation to you as it is to the reader. I'm afraid it is possible to exhaust your material. What you exhaust are those things that you are capable of bringing alive. I mean if you've done it once, you don't want to do the same thing over. The longer you write the more conscious you are of what you can and cannot make live. What you have to do is try to deepen your penetration of these things.


Conversations with Flannery O'Connor edited by Rosemary M. Magee. Excerpt from an Interview with C. Ross Mullins, Jr. published in Jubilee, June 1963