A Good Man Is Hard to Find Archive
A Moment of Grace in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
At its heart, like so many of Flannery O’Connor’s stories, "A Good Man is Hard to Find” is a story about error at the level of perception, about a confrontation with reality, and the grace that can enter a human heart when a person is stripped down to nothing.
What Plot Can Do
Image, character, language are static, dead things until plot gets a hold of them and makes them move. The more I write, the more I pay attention when I read, the more I understand that I love characters and words and pictures because of the way plot animates them.
On Being Under the Gun
There is something about pressure that fascinates me. I never could stand to stick a pin into a balloon, but I would rub one against my head to make my hair stand on end and, in the slow, painstaking process, break the sack of air against my skull.
Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find
These narratives depict a South struggling for identity in the middle years of the twentieth century, peopled with crooked Bible salesmen, earnest preachers, escaped convicts, one-armed grifters, and wayward souls seeking salvation, or at least satisfaction.
Cartoons & Archetypes: How They Work and What to Know
I learned about character development not by studying it, but by understanding the nature of cartoons. I spent years sculpting superheroes and cartoon characters for DC Comics, Nickelodeon, Pixar, and others. Although the perception is changing, the art world considers cartooning of all kinds to be a distant, lesser
Fiction Responding to Fiction: Flannery O’Connor and Alice Munro
Munro has spoken about her debt to American writers from the South, including O’Connor, and we can clearly see how “Save the Reaper” is responding to O’Connor’s story by touching on similar themes and even moments, and yet spinning off from the original in true Munro fashion.
Fiction Responding to Fiction: Flannery O’Connor and Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen often tells stories in his songs which investigate the human condition, the lyrics following a narrative arc with a clear beginning, middle and end. It is therefore not surprising that fiction is one of the places where he finds inspiration.