Friday Forays in Fiction: Quote

"When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you to experience the meaning more fully." Flannery O'Connor

I'm going to bring back my weekly Friday Forays in Fiction in hopes that it will stimulate and/or encourage me to return to practicing my craft. It was probably a mistake to drop it when I got lax about writing fiction for it is likely the hiatus would not have been so long nor so hard to return from if I'd had to either muse upon the theme of story craft or present snippets of my stories once a week.

This fiction themed post would sometime present snippets form my own fiction rough drafts. But usually it was discussion about my WIP, musings on craft, work habits, creativity or reviews of books about the craft or biographies or memoirs of authors. Now I'm going to add quotes relevant to the topic to the mix so that I'll always have something quick and easy to post when I got nothing else or no time.

I've discovered in the past that just the simple act of bringing my thought back to the topic will stimulate the creativity and the motivation to return to task.