The Ability to Create Life with Words by Flannery O'Connor

The Ability to Create Life with Words 

by 

Flannery O'Connor

I still suspect that most people start out with some kind of ability to tell a story but that it gets lost along the way. Of course, the ability to create life with words is essentially a gift. If you have it in the first place, you can develop it; if you don't have it, you might as well forget it.

But I have found that people who don't have it are frequently the ones hell-bent on writing stories. I'm sure anyway that they are the ones who write the books and the magazine articles on how-to-write-short-stories. I have a friend who is taking a correspondence course in this subject, and she has passed a few of the chapter headings on to me—such as, "The Story Formula for Writers," "How to Create Characters," "Let's Plot!" This form of corruption is costing her twenty-seven dollars.

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About the Author

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. When she died at the age of thirty-nine, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers. O’Connor wrote two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and two story collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1964). Her Complete Stories, published posthumously in 1972, won the National Book Award that year, and in a 2009 online poll it was voted as the best book to have won the award in the contest’s 60-year history. Her essays were published in Mystery and Manners (1969) and her letters in The Habit of Being (1979). In 1988 the Library of America published her Collected Works; she was the first postwar writer to be so honored. O’Connor was educated at the Georgia State College for Women, studied writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and wrote much of Wise Blood at the Yaddo artists’ colony in upstate New York. She lived most of her adult life on her family’s ancestral farm, Andalusia, outside Milledgeville, Georgia.

 

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Fiction Writing | Wikipedia

 Fiction Writing 

Wikipedia

Fiction writing is the composition of non-factual prose texts. Fictional writing often is produced as a story meant to entertain or convey an author's point of view. The result of this may be a short story, novel, novella, screenplay, or drama, which are all types (though not the only types) of fictional writing styles. Different types of authors practice fictional writing, including novelists, playwrights, short story writers, radio dramatists and screenwriters. 

Genre Fiction

A genre is the subject matter or category that writers use. For instance, science fiction, fantasy and mystery fiction are genres. Genre fiction also known as popular fiction, is plot-driven fictional works written with the intent of fitting into a specific literary genre, in order to appeal to readers and fans already familiar with that genre.

Genre fiction is storytelling driven by plot, as opposed to literary fiction, which focuses more on theme and character. Genre fiction, or popular fiction, is written to appeal to a large audience and it sells more primarily because it is more commercialised. An example is the Twilight series which may sell more than Herman Melville's Moby Dick, because the Twilight novels deal with elements of pop culture – romance and vampires. 

Literary Fiction

Literary fiction is fictional works that hold literary merit, that is to say, they are works that offer social commentary, or political criticism, or focus on aspect of the human condition.

Literary fiction is usually contrasted with, popular, commercial, or genre fiction. Some have described the difference between them in terms of analysing reality (literary) rather than escaping reality (popular). The contrast between these two categories of fiction is controversial among some critics and scholars.

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1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Captain Grose et al.

 

1811 DICTIONARY OF THE VULGAR TONGUE.

 

by

Francis Grose

 

A DICTIONARY OF BUCKISH SLANG, UNIVERSITY WIT, AND PICKPOCKET ELOQUENCE.
 

UNABRIDGED FROM THE ORIGINAL 1811 EDITION WITH A FOREWORD BY ROBERT CROMIE
 

COMPILED ORIGINALLY BY CAPTAIN GROSE.
AND NOW CONSIDERABLY ALTERED AND ENLARGED, WITH THE MODERN CHANGES AND IMPROVEMENTS, BY A MEMBER OF THE WHIP CLUB.
 

ASSISTED BY HELL-FIRE DICK, AND JAMES GORDON, ESQRS. OF CAMBRIDGE; AND WILLIAM SOAMES, ESQ. OF THE HON. SOCIETY OF NEWMAN'S HOTEL.

 

The "1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue," was written by Francis Grose (a British soldier) just after the American Revolution. The word "vulgar" means slang, though some of them are vulgar. This book was banned in military camps at the time. This book is hysterical, both educational and entertaining. It shows how normal people spoke over 200 years ago, and provides endless possibilities for insulting friends. It is an old dictionary of words that will "pitch kettle" (confound) people if you actually use them, and others are still around, like "to catch a crab" (to fall backwards by missing one's stroke in rowing). If you are into quirky dictionaries like this, then you'll enjoy it.

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About the Author

Francis Grose (approximately 1731-1791) was an English antiquary, draughtsman, and lexicographer. He was born at his father's house in Broad Street, St-Peter-le-Poer, London, son of a Swiss immigrant and jeweler. Grose had early shown a keen interest in drawing, having attempted sketches of medieval buildings as far back as 1749, and having taken formal instruction at a drawing school in the mid-1750s. He was not a particularly gifted draughtsman but he mixed in the London artistic milieu and began to exhibit, first at the Society of Artists in 1767-8 and then at the Royal Academy. His interest was in the field of medieval remains, which were beginning to exercise an increasing grip on the public imagination. In 1772 he published the first part of The Antiquities of England and Wales, a work which he unashamedly aimed at the popular market. Essentially it targeted those who wanted to know about antiquities but had neither time nor means to visit them in person, and contained small panoramas of medieval ruins, together with an informative text on a separate page. Sometimes the text was taken from books already published, or from information supplied by other antiquaries (both acknowledged); sometimes Grose collated material himself from which he could work up an article. From 1772 onwards he also toured the country to visit and draw sites for inclusion in The Antiquities. The fourth and last volume came out in June 1776, and Grose almost immediately began work on a supplement. His publishing career was interrupted however when the Surrey militia was again called into service between 1778 and 1783. This was not a happy experience for him. Where previously Grose had been able to spend his summers visiting and sketching ancient sites he was now obliged to attend his regiment in various training camps. He did not get on well with his new commanding officer, and he handled regimental finances in a slipshod manner. The result was that he incurred debts towards fellow officers that would take years to straighten out. The financial pressure however forced him to increase both the rate and the range of his publications. The Supplement to The Antiquities was resumed in 1783, this time with a higher proportion of the illustrations being done by other artists. Drawing on his own fieldwork Grose also branched out into producing dictionaries, including the famous A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785).

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