Flash Link: David Aichenbaum Discusses What’s the Matter in Fiction

At the Mat­ter Press blog, David Aichen­baum talks about reach­ing “for that mag­i­cal bal­ance” of sub­stance and spir­it. He begins:

My plan was to write a sort of struc­tured mini-essay, care­ful­ly laid out. But I chanced upon a few mat­ter-full para­graphs writ­ten by Flan­nery O’Connor:

It is a good deal eas­i­er for most peo­ple to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-cre­ate some object that they actu­al­ly see. But the world of the fic­tion writer is full of mat­ter and this is what the begin­ning fic­tion writ­ers are very loath to cre­ate. They are con­cerned pri­mar­i­ly with unfleshed ideas and emo­tions. They are apt to be reform­ers and to want to write because they are pos­sessed not by a sto­ry but by the bare bones of some abstract notion. They are con­scious of prob­lems, not of peo­ple, of ques­tions and issues, not of the tex­ture of exis­tence, of case his­to­ries and of every­thing that has a soci­o­log­i­cal smack, instead of with all those con­crete details of life that make actu­al the mys­tery of our posi­tion on earth” (Mys­tery and Man­ners, The Nature and Aim of Fic­tion, 67). 

Read the rest here.